ROSSUM’S UNIVERSAL ROBOTS
Perhaps the next study of the consequences of a machine that thinks is a remarkable play called R.U.R. (for Rossum’s Universal Robots), first produced in Prague in 1921. Karel Čapek, the Czech dramatist who wrote it, was then only 31. The word “robot” comes from the Czech word “robota,” meaning compulsory service.
According to the play, Rossum the elder, a scientist, discovered a “method of organizing living matter” that was “more simple, flexible, and rapid” than the method used by nature. Rossum the younger, an engineer, founded a factory for the mass production of artificial workmen, robots. They had the form of human beings, intelligence, memory, and strength; but they were without feelings.
In the first act, the factory under Harry Domin, General Manager, is busy supplying robots to purchasers all over the world—for work, for fighting, for any purpose at all, to anyone who could pay for them. Domin declares:
“... in ten years, Rossum’s Universal Robots will produce so much corn, so much cloth, so much everything that things will be practically without price. There will be no poverty. All work will be done by living machines. Everybody will be free from worry and liberated from the degradation of labor. Everybody will live only to perfect himself.... It’s bound to happen.”
In the second act, ten years later, it turns out that Domin and the others in charge of the factory have been making some robots with additional human characteristics, such as the capacity to feel pain. The newer types of robots, however, have united all the robots against man, for the robots declare that they are “more highly developed than man, stronger, and more intelligent, and man is their parasite.”
In the last act, the robots conquer and slay all men except one—an architect, Alquist, who in the epilogue provides a final quirk to the plot.