What is a clanker and why do we need this word? : NPR

The debate on summer song is raging, but if there was a competition for a word from the summer, a leading track would surely be the onomatopoéic clanker.

In recent weeks, Clanker has reached viral levels in Tiktok and Instagram. A popular video from July shows a delivery robot on the wheels – the genre that looks like a mobile cooler with flashing lights that look like eyes – stopped on a plot of grass on the side of a road. As a man and a woman pass by, they point and cry: “Fillthy … remove them in the streets. Clanker! Clanker! Clanker!”

Even with little background, it clearly emerges from the context indices that Clanker is not a good thing, but in this episode of the word of the week, we will answer – what exactly means?

Adam Aleksic, linguist, author and creator of better known content on social media under the name of @etomologynerd, told NPR that it was a derogatory term for robots which stems from the star wars universe dating from 2005. “He was referenced in Star Wars and in the Clone wars series. They would call for clan robots because of the sound they made. This clearly implies a clands. … And then we adopted it because it seems useful. “”

While other science fiction franchises and fandoms have created their own lexicon which included robot insults – Battlestar Galactica And Blade runner The two used the Employment Skin as a pejorative for robots of human appearance – Aleksic said, these terms did not really understand because they did not make sense. He noted that Clanker has already had a long life on Star Wars’ srobeddits, specifically of the Battlefront video games, and as the same, where people use it to minimize robots. According to Aleksic, the reason why Clanker goes the dominant current is that it meets a need because we see more robots in our daily life, according to Aleksic. And, he adds, he has now evolved into generative AI platforms like Chatgpt.

Visitors play Star Wars Battlefront, a video game published by Pandemic Studios, on October 28, 2015, during the Paris match week.

Patrick Covarik / AFP via Getty Images

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Patrick Covarik / AFP via Getty Images

“I remember the January tweets of this year when people said:” Oh, we need an insult for AI. “And finally, it seems that this cultural need is satisfied,” he said.

Last week, Senator Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., Promoted his latest X bill using the insult. “As a patient to shout the” representative “in the phone just to talk to a human being 10 times? My new bill ensures that you don’t have to speak to a clanker if you don’t want to,” he wrote.

Aleksic said that the use of the word intrinsically creates an external group. An American state of mind against them. But the irony, he noted, is that by attaching the word to non-attractive creations (at least for the moment), it anthropomorphizes the robots similar to an ethnic group or a group of people. “And at the same time, it brings them to humans to be even dehumanized in the first place. Ironically, people who say that Clanker attributes more personality to these robots that they really exist.”

Many memes now circulating in xenophobia of all this and what social media uses call racism or robophobia. By using existing stereotypes and tropes, they joke about a not too distant future where robots are omnipresent as second -class citizens, confronted with discrimination in the same way as blacks and other racial or ethnic groups in America have historically been confronted.

In a video with more than 7.7 million views, the user of Tiktok @vibestealer, who is a young black man, claims that it is 2044 and that his daughter brought a boyfriend from robot. Disturbing music plays in the background when he asks questions about the intentions of the robot, while coughing the words “clanker” and “garbage” in his fist. “I don’t want you to wings near my daughter!” He shouts at some point.

Another popular iteration of the same presents people who pretend to apologize to their future robots suzerains for past anti-robot transgressions, including the use of “word C”.

The robots all arrive for us

An autonomous robotic delivery robot, which uses AI and is without emissions, crosses a pedestrian crossing on a sidewalk on March 19, 2024 in West Hollywood, California.

Mario Tama / Getty Images from North America

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Mario Tama / Getty Images from North America

The propagation of clankers occurs while AI is fundamentally transforming work and the workplace as we know them.

“We have a social need right now to meet the proliferation of AI, especially when AI takes human jobs, especially when they replace online creators,” said Aleksic.

A survey in 2023 Pew Research Center revealed that the majority of Americans are wary of the use of AI in the workplace. Seventy percent said they thought that using AI at work will have a major impact on workers over the next 20 years. About a third believe that the advantages and damage will also be divided for workers. Meanwhile, 22% are uncertain of its potential effect.

Perhaps no other generation feels that more acute than generation Z, many of which are now graduates from the college. As NPR reported, economists think that the 2025 labor market is the most difficult in the last decade – not to mention the pandemic period. And this is likely to worsen in a generation.

“To be clear, on a longer time horizon – and by longer, we are talking about 15 to 20 years old, not 50 or a hundred years – there will be practically nothing that a human being can do that a machine can not do as or better for a small fraction of the cost”, Adam Dorr, the director of research for undressed technologies, said NPR. “This is simply where the technology of artificial intelligence, robotics and automation is directed.”

For the moment, he said, we live in a period of grace, when AI will improve the work we do. “They will kill our productivity. They will complete human workforce.”

In the opinion of Dorr, which he describes as optimistic, it creates a chance for a world in which humans will be free from work. The chore which is the work and the manufacture and distribution of products will be moved to robots and AI, leaving people released in a way that they have never been before. And there is no time to waste creating a brand new framework for that.

“There is certainly an emergency to this whole situation. But that does not mean that it is a cause of panic. It is not a crisis, and it is not yet a disaster,” he said.

The question is: will we always say Clanker in this world?