Kathleen Richardson - An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines

Karelapek was born on 9 January 1890 in the Habsburg Empire, which became a sovereign state of Czechoslovakia in 1918 and then the Czech Republic after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1993 that brought about the separation the Czech Republic from Slovakia.apek was a playwright and journalist and, as a journalist, he wrote for Lidove Noviny (The Peoples Paper); in 1921, he and his brother Josef became its editors. Before going on to unpick the themes in R.U.R. ,apeks other significant plays included The War with the Newts (1937), which is about human-like salamanders taking over the world, and The Insect Play (1921), a play he wrote with his brother, Josef. The Insect Play is a commentary on Czechoslovakian politics after the horrors of World War Iand most of the characters are nonhuman.

apek used salamanders, insects and robots as nonhuman devices in his plays to critically reflect on human life, politics and existence, yet it was the robot that catapulted Karelapek to international (and historical) notoriety. The naming of the Robot (he capitalized the R, but I wont unless referring to the plays text), belongs, not to Karel, but to his brother, Josef apek, who thought of the term robot to describe the artificial beings in his play. In Russian, Ukrainian and other East Slavonic languages, the term robota is a word for work but has a specific meaning in Czech referring to the surplus labor of peasants in the feudal economy. It was this latter meaning that inspired Josef to invent the term robot. Robota (labor debt paid to lords) encompassed many aspects of the labor of peasants, most notably their obligation (Wright 1966). The theme of labor or work is key to its meaning. One might say the robot is another way of saying an obligated worker. The term robot entered the English language after April 1923 when R.U.R. was performed by the Reandean Company at St. Martins Theatre in London. The robot was used initially byapek to describe a soulless artificial being who is created to work. What do I mean by soulless? The robots in the play have no independent interiority, feeling, thought or desire and act on commands and instructions from their human masters.

Let us explore some of these themes. The robot rests on the idea that the grand ideal is to build artificial workers to maximize production and free-up human labor from mindless tasks instead created even more problems in society. The substitution of humans by robots led,apek imagined, to a loss of human purpose. This theme was a definite reflection on the changing work practices transforming Europe, North America and Russia, which machines and humans tied together in production. Here is my synopsis of the play:

The play is set on an Island where robots are mass-produced. The factory is run by the general director, Domin. One day, Helena Glory comes to the Island to liberate the robots. Glory believes the robots should have the same rights as humans. In a twist, she is married to Domin. As the years pass, robots are now even more prolific in the world than before. In secret, Helena has persuaded the scientist Hal to change the formula for some of the robots. The robots, with the new formula, can feel and love. These robots lead a rebellion against the humans. As the world comes to an end, the members of the factory reflect on the meaning of life, but all are slaughtered, except for one man, Alquist. Alquist is only allowed to live because he is a worker, too. In another twist, the formula to create the robots is destroyed, and the robots cannot survive if they cannot find a way to produce. It is left to Alquist to try to find the formula, but he fails and, without the formula for robot life, the last surviving human, namely Alquist, and the robots will eventually perish. Two of the feeling robots, Helana and Primus, choose love over violence.

R.U.R. was very successful throughout Europe, Russia and America in the 1920s. The play premiered at the Garrick Theatre, New York City in 1922 and ran for 184 performances.apeks robots captured the imagination of the time and, after the first performance in New York in 1922, critics wrote The most brilliant satire on our mechanical age; the grimiest yet subtlest arraignment of this strange, mad thing we call industrial society of today (cited in Reichardt 1978, p. 36). The success of the term robot also replaced automaton as the term to characterize working beings. What was perhaps most significant about the arrival of the robot was that it captured a spirit of the age.apek created the robot character as a way to comment on what he thought was the contemporary preoccupation with labor and production.

The robot is a creature that is an outcome of separations, transitions and mergers. I identify two important boundary transgressions the robot makes in R.U.R. The first is that the robot is humanlike but is without agency and subjectivity, like a thing. Second, the robot is able to become humanlike by developing subjectivity: feeling and consciousness. The robot is paradoxical: human and nonhuman at the same time. It is an intermediary somewhere between human and nonhuman, a human envisaged as not quite human. In other words, the robot is an intermediary between the human and nonhuman via the role of labor. There is a final theme that could be quite confusing to a reader, that two robots may be able to repopulate the world again because they have found love. The theme of love is an important theme in robot narratives, as is robot destruction. Robot agents in the play become aware of their position in the social order and develop consciousness. The play marks the end of the human, and in violence this new world ruled by robots is created. The robots that choose violence will perish. The robots that choose love will prosper.