Robotics. Tool or replacement?
Robotics - for jobs that fit one or more of the 4 Ds: Dirty, Dull, Dangerous, and/or Delicate (think Da Vinci surgical robot).
Modern robotics might be said to have started in 1955 when the Denavit-Hartenburg convention (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denavit–Hartenberg_parameters) for specifying the metrics of kinematic chains (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinematic_chain) was developed. Aside from all of the computational elements, the study of the mechanical aspects (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_kinematics) would probably be found to be interesting by many Sprinter forum participants. There is some hairy math involved at some points, but the basic concepts are understandable without having to get into all of the math.
Factory automation was a beginning for robotics. The idea of a robot as a small(er) independent platform that acts in the real world like a person might can conceptually be traced back to Rossum's Universal Robots (1920 -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.). Not all robots are like that, however. A large Unimate arm (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unimate) is a "robot", as is a Tesla in self-drive mode, or one of the driverless taxies that are becoming common in some places. Also the various space probes that have been launched to explore the sun and planets of our solar system, and independent (non-tethered) underwater exploration vehicles.
I see robots/robotics as tools, sometimes intelligent tools (many robots do not have to have much in the way of intelligence as opposed to simple planning, sensing, acting, and reacting). A car with simple "cruise control" has robotic behavior, for example. Science fiction takes the intelligent tool idea to an extreme, and postulates the tools having something more than mere intelligence so that they become independent conscious entities. That is not an end-goal that I harbor for robotics, but I can see how it *might* happen *if* some kind of accidental advancement brings it about at some very distant future date. The deliberate creation of conscious entities that are supposed to only follow the direction of humans would simply be slavery.