1. Prague 1921: Capek invents the idea of the Universal Robot. The Universal Robot was an android that could do any productive task.
2. England 1936: Turing (re-)invents Babbage’s idea of the Universal Computer – one which can compute any mathematical function. Cycles of the Universal Turing machine are the fundamental cost metric for algorithms.
3. London 1938: World’s first science fiction TV broadcast Rossum’s Universal Robots by Capek, introduces the notion of the Robot to the English.

4. Here is the first key to understanding Babbage and Marx’s ideas of value:

   1. we humans are the only universal robots so far known,
   2. thus human cycle times are the basic cost metric for any task.

Paul Cockshott: Entropy and information in science and political economy (2012, slides)