“... 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.
FACT AND FANCY
Now what is fact and what is fancy in these two warnings given to us a hundred years apart?
Of course, it is very doubtful that a Frankenstein monster or a Rossum robot will soon be constructed with nerves, flesh, and blood like an animal body. But we know that many types of robot machines can even now be constructed out of hardware—wheels, motors, wires, electronic tubes, etc. They can handle many kinds of information and are able to perform many kinds of actions, and they are stronger and swifter than man.
Of course, it is doubtful that the robot machines, by themselves and of their own “free will,” will be dangerous to human beings. But as soon as antisocial human beings have access to the controls over robot machines, the danger to society becomes great. We want to escape that danger.
Escape from Danger
A natural longing of many of us is to escape to an earlier, simpler life on this earth. Victor Frankenstein longed to undo the past. He said:
“Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”