The following is a short essay I wrote for an anthology, edited by Jitka Čejková, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the play Rossum's Universal Robots by Karel Čapek. Sadly only a small subset of the anthology was published in English. Since my essay didn't make the cut and is therefore only available in Czech, I am posting the English version here.
Dated SciFi, great play
I think in some ways the success of the play has made it somewhat obsolete if seen as purely science fiction. Essentially all of its ideas have become staples of genre fiction and, in the last decades, even mainstream popular culture (a good argument could for example be made that the wildly successful TV series Westworld is more or less an elaborate retelling of R.U.R.). However, there are aspects to it that are still relevant.
There are different aspects to the play or ways to interpret it:
We can interpret it literally and take its predictions concerning the development of robot technology and the way it is used industrially seriously.
However, as most science fiction the play has not aged well if seen solely under this aspect. Many of the ideas put forth seem rather quaint, most of all the notion of a universal humanoid robot. In a time when automation was still in its infancy – Ford’s famous assembly line had been established just 7 years prior - and most work was carried out by humans, this probably seemed perfectly natural. Since then, however, we have seen machines take over a vast multitude of tasks from humans – from assembly line workers via computers (the human kind) to travel agents – and for all of them using a specialized and purpose-built piece of hardware or software is much more practical than employing a humanoid robot.
This touches on another issue by the way – the very notion of a robot in the play – as an artificial human – seems rather old-fashioned from today’s point of view. History, and in particular the last two decades, has shown that the artificial systems that take over tasks formerly done by humans (or augment them) are of many different types of which robots in the narrow sense – as monolithic, somewhat autonomous machines – are only a small part. And even those only occasionally reproduce parts of the functionality of a human body.
Another interesting aspect of the play is what I would call the ethical dimension. When does an artificial construct (or any non-human entity) deserve rights similar to humans? What happens if it refuses to remain subordinate to humans?
For a long time (at least since the AI winter of the 70s when it became obvious that creating intelligence was orders of magnitude less straightforward than people had naively believed) these questions seemed to be firmly relegated to science fiction. However, with the recent advances in AI as well as genetic engineering there is a chance that they might gain real-world relevance at some point (this might again turn out be a rather naive assumption of course). In that aspect the play holds up well in my opinion. It is clearly not a PhD thesis on the topic (nor does it obviously aim to be), but it poses the right questions and stimulates important thoughts. On the other hand, these topics have been a staple of fiction in all kinds of media (just to name a few random examples: I, Robot, Westworld, Bladerunner, Terminator, The Matrix) as well as subject of serious academic work and have accordingly since been dealt with in far greater depth.
I think, however, that as valid as they are, all of these literal interpretations somewhat miss the point. In my perfectly subjective understanding the main value and intention of the play (similar to Čapek's other works and to some degree a lot of great SciFi and Fantasy) is allegorical. I would see this not so much as a play about robots (actually replicants), but rather about (early) industrial society and humanity in general.
Interestingly, the robots in the play are on a bizarrely contradictory kind of double duty. First, they serve as a larger than life display of the dangers of automation. Humans are being replaced, first as workers and then as inhabitants of the planet, reflecting the very real threat to jobs and livelihoods by the increasing automation of production processes. At the same time, however, they stand in for the real-life exploited working class (the very same whose livelihoods they threaten) whose members are treated as a soulless commodity by the ruling elite.
This is matched perfectly by the behaviour of Domin and his cronies – representing the (all-male, of course) ruling elite – who show a general disregard for anything outside of their own little world. I think even Domin’s treatment of Helena and her rather sudden, meek acceptance of her situation make sense in this context. The scene where she accepts his marriage “proposal” seemed jarring and unlikely to me at first, but – this might admittedly an over-interpretation on my part – read as an allegorical representation of the status of women in 1920s society it becomes a more organic part of the play.
Tolkien once said that he strongly disliked allegories and that he wanted his dragons to be dragons rather than stand-ins for something else. While I used to passionately agree with him when I was younger, nowadays I think that at least in the counter-factual genres an allegorical component can make the difference between a good and a great story. And there is no need to choose either – the best stories will work on both levels, the literal and the allegorical. Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go for example is at the same time a beautiful, tragic love story, a warning about the dangers of the commercialization of cloning, a meditation on what makes us human and an allegory about the conflict between consciousness and mortality.
Similarly, all interpretations of R.U.R that I have discussed above are not mutually exclusive and can coexist. I think although the technological aspects seem dated the work therefore still has aesthetic value if seen as a whole. The play undoubtedly is of considerable historical importance, however even beyond that it is definitely still worth a read (or a visit to the theatre).
