In Kevin Drum’s latest feature, he imagines a bleak future where robots begin taking all of our jobs. Though he predicts this will happen about three decades from now, the concept obviously isn’t new.

The president of Unimate and one of the first industrial robots appear on the Tonight Show, in which they demonstrate how to play golf, pour a beer, and get sassy with the band. Johnny Carson marvels ...

Do you know the name [George Devol]? Probably not. In 1961 he received a patent for “Programmed Article Transfer.” We’d call his invention the first robot arm, and its name was the Unimate. Unlike ...

Years before personal computers, at the end of the 1950s, robots were already working in factories–or at least one was. The Unimate 1900 series was the first mass-produced robotic arm for use in ...