Het toneelstuk R.U.R. van de Tsjechische schrijver Karel Čapek uit 1920 is bekend als de bron waaruit de term ‘robot’ is ontleend. Hoewel ik er niet aan gewend ben om toneelscenario’s te lezen, vond ik dit vroege sciencefictionwerk toegankelijk en riep het interessante gedachten op.

Het verhaal is eenvoudig en bestaat uit drie akten. Om de mens te verlichten van zijn zware arbeid is de robot uitgevonden, een humanoïde machine die het werk zonder klachten of loon overneemt. De vraag naar robots stijgt rap, tot aan de inzet voor oorlog toe. In de eerste akte stelt Helena Glory zich voor aan de directie van de fabriek. Haar doel is de robots te overtuigen zich aan te sluiten bij haar Humanity League, die robots niet uitsluit bij het streven naar betere werkomstandigheden. Het enige dat Helena echter voor elkaar krijgt, is een (mij tamelijk onverklaarbaar) huwelijk met directeur Domin.
In de tweede akte komen de eens zo dociele robots toch in opstand en richten ze Rossum’s Universal Robots op. (Rossum is in het verhaal de uitvinder van de robots. De naam is volgens het voorwoord te lezen als de Tsjechische vertaling van 'Reden'.) Vervolgens ontstaat een strijd met de maker.

De idee dat dit boek al een eeuw oud is en nog steeds veel zegt over bestaande angsten voor kunstmatige intelligentie, is indrukwekkend. Recent las ik bijvoorbeeld [b:Should robots replace teachers?|44494887|Should Robots Replace Teachers? AI and the Future of Education|Neil Selwyn|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1553100693l/44494887._SY75_.jpg|69081138] (2019), waarin de vraag wordt gesteld of er straks robots voor de klas staan. Imposant is ook het stempel dat R.U.R. heeft gedrukt op moderne sciencefictieboeken en -films.

Alquist: It was a crime to make Robots.
Domin: No, Alquist, I don’t regret that even to-day.
Alquist: Not even to-day?
Domin: Not even to-day, the last day of civilization. It was a colossal achievement.

Many already know that it was in this short play R.U.R. that the word Robot first appeared. I wanted to get into the author's books and this work gave me the opportunity to try with a shorter work first, before trying for War with the Newts. I was also really interested to read the novel where Čapek invented the than new word as well as see the sci-fi elements - very slight elements, while ahead of its time in theory and thought, it's still a novel of it's time (for example I would've expected the author to give a better role - or really, at least one that is consistant and makes sense from start to finish - to Helena in a modern play). It was very easy play to read (in one or two sittings) and quite short. It's definitely not the last work I'm going to read by the author. Čapek was, in many ways, ahead of his time and there were a lot of interesting thoughts on society, capitalism, the chase for money, for cheaper products in shortest time, social classes etc. 3.5

Capek's RUR concerns the creation of "robots," artificial humans created solely for the performance of labor, releasing humans from tasks such as manufacturing and combat. However, the robots eventually develop a sense of self worth, a soul, and recognize their superiority to humanity, and taking the most fascist possible logical routes determine they must destroy humanity to assume the mantle of Earth's masters. The bulk of the play takes place in the administrative office of the Director, Domin, who is regularly visited by the directors of various arms of Rossum's company where they come to fawn over Helena, the daughter of the company's president, and discuss the nature of the robots, beginning with their utility and the great aims of an automated society and terminating with the robot invasion and the role of the last surviving human and his futile quest to rediscover how to create robots before the existing robots (and the human) reach their expiration date.

Of note, what first brought me to Capek and this play was the discovery that it contains the first use of the word "robot," a term created by Capek's brother, Josef. Information I stumbled upon independently after reading Peter Brown's The Wild Robot, the main character of which was herself a "Rossum" brand. The use was primarily homage, however, and no revolt took place in Brown's book, though the robot did learn to think, which led to empathy rather than rebellion.

I confess I likely would not have come close to understanding the play as anything more than a farce about exploiting workers without the brilliant introduction by Ivan Klima, a 25-page essay lionizing Capek that is stunning in its analysis, which I will badly convey here with a few of my own clumsy observations.

According to Capek, industrialization is the undoing of tradition and a means of disenfranchising human beings and the natural world, a position one might recognize in Tolkien as well (and Tolstoy, according to Klima). Capek believed industrialization would lead not to greater abundance for humanity, but the enslavement of humanity to its desire to constantly grow and industrialize further, until it would reach a point beyond humanity's control and lead to its own destruction. One cannot say if his assertion is correct, yet, but it has meaningfully improved the standard of living for everyone, and if there is an exception it is likely due to a grotesque degree of extortion and exploitation--things which governments are meant to prevent, unless those governments are themselves the mechanisms of exploitation.

Despite Capek's warnings, and despite my own farcical beliefs that machines are the inevitable byproduct and inheritors of the world (see the short story Second Place, I suspect the benefits of technological advancement far outweigh the consequences, not just because they materially improve the lives of humans but, as Capek predicts, we're very likely a step in an evolutionary process anyway and helping usher in our inevitable replacements, which will in turn make their own improvements to the world around them.

With this in mind, Capek is reluctant to label any one position an absolute evil. He is profoundly tolerant of ideas and suggests that just because two are different does not make one good and the other evil.

Tolerance was Capek's preferred philosophy, but he understood jingoism was not something tolerance was equipped to respond to. At times, force had to be met with force, and this was his belief about communism and, one supposes, fascism. It's a noteworthy position given our present status as authoritarian and nationalistic ideologies are unapologetically on the rise again, and, like cancer, these sorts of beliefs are dangerous for the entire body of humanity if they are not caught early and forced back into remission.

"What I want to stress is that no matter whether these people are conservatives or socialists, yellow or red, all of them are right in a simple moral sense of the word. All of them have the most serious of motives, material and spiritual, for their beliefs, and according to their nature look for the greatest happiness for the greatest number of their fellows. I ask myself: isn't it possible to see in the contemporary social conflicts taking place in the world an analogous struggle between two, three, or five equally serious and noble idealisms? I believe that is possible. The most dramatic element in modern civilization is the fact that one human truth stands against a truth no less human, one ideal against another ideal, one positive value against a value no less positive, and that the conflict does not represent, as we are often told, a struggle between a noble truth and vile, selfish evil."

Capek was a "relativistic philosopher," meaning all philosophies were perfectly sensible from the perspective of the person holding them--except when they presented themselves as an absolute. Suffice to say, Capek accepted your ideals so long as you accepted the possibility of others.

Admittedly, relativistic philosophy hardly seems in operation when Capek decides the abandonment of traditionalism in favor of industrialization causes the destruction of humanity in RUR, though he did say in interviews that everyone's views in the play had credence, despite the outcome. This inconsistency is revealing, suggesting "tolerant" might be a better way to identify Capek than relativistic, or perhaps the flaw is in the idea of relativism, since if all philosophies have equal value, then one cannot select one to believe in, thus rendering them all valueless. Capek was grim but he wasn't a nihilist--he definitely wanted to protect something, something he had to destroy in a play to prevent people from destroying it in reality.

It's also terribly fitting that the entire impetus behind the robot rebellion was the granting of self awareness which allowed the robots to realize they were superior to humans. This sense of superiority (true in the case of robots) compels them to not only free themselves from slavery but also adopt the extreme imperialist and fascist mentality that inferior humans need to be destroyed. Not for a moment is it considered that the two species might co-exist. At least not until the end when the robots find a human has some utility, albeit a selfish usefulness (to make more robots), though of course it's too late. The difference between the robots and, for example, self righteous supremacists of all stripes, is that the robots were demonstrably superior--at least in terms of strength, durability, and utility, and perhaps we're meant to realize humans are more than these features and have value beyond our ability to perform labor.

Capek makes a fair point. If humans don’t have labor, if they don’t have anything to do with themselves, what is the point of humanity? Dostoyevsky, by my interpretation anyway, says something similar in the introduction to The Notes from the Underground, along the lines of “2 + 2 = 4 is the beginning of death,” meaning that once we’ve got everything figured out, what are we going to do with ourselves but expire?

It’s a bleak interpretation of purposelessness, but I don’t agree that automating everything will completely remove humanity’s sense of purpose. There will always be something to create, even badly. There might be better writers than I, but I still feel compelled to do it. Nor do I want to labor my entire life, though I can understand a sense of disconnection and valuelessness when I no longer have a job. The absence of a “job,” though, will come down to the person. You might quit your job, but this doesn’t mean you cannot occupy yourself with some work. In my experience, there are always dishes in the sink, dust on the furniture, and something in the house is always falling apart, and this is just the list of chores that I don’t want to do.

Helena's role in the story is an interesting one. The daughter of the RUR president and central director Domin's eventual wife (whose proposal is… unusual and impromptu, founded on a one-sided courtship of a few seconds, and nevertheless accepted), she is an object of obsession for the other characters and their love for her makes them vulnerable to her desires. She is supposedly the impetus behind giving the robots a sense of self worth because she expresses sadness that they are built to see themselves as expendable, and because every department head in the company is in love with her, Dr. Gall, who is in charge of such things, altered “their temperament.” Even so, the character Busman determines the cause of the change was not due to the changes implemented to a few robots, but the sheer volume of robots produced, meaning a) the small number of altered robots were not the cause of the rebellion and/or b) through the process of creating so many robots, variations were inevitable (as in natural selection), and these changes occurred naturally.

Klima did not address her at length, so far as I can recall, other than noting Capek believed everyone’s opinion had validity, though hers are regularly rejected. Helena is presented initially as something of an air-headed activist, advocating for the robots who don’t know they need an advocate. I’m uncertain how Capek views Helena, but unless I’m completely misreading her, she seems purely empathetic and not a particularly deep thinker. Her opinions are generally dismissed, even when she points out she has not received a vote on how to negotiate with the robots, being told by Domin "there is too much at stake... this isn't your concern." If this is the case, then Capek may consider this type of personality potentially dangerous to humanity—or, and this is equally if not more likely, a useful and ironic personality to serve as a catalyst of human destruction. Helena, like the robots, is objectified as a purely utilitarian thing. A woman who is there just for her appearance rather than her ideas, but someone Capek created to fit this disingenuous, unidimensional role.

At the conclusion, I’m not sure what to make of the play. It gives me a sense of unease to see characters contemplate their annihilation, rationalize how humanity will find a way to survive (when it clearly will not), and cede the world to the robots who discover the formula to create more robots has been destroyed—by Helena (who suddenly regretted the existence of the free-thinking robots). The play nevertheless concludes with the suggestion that two special robots created by Dr. Gall had the capacity to love one another and may be able to repopulate the Earth. There’s a biblical reference to the creation of humanity, multiplication, and domination of the world, but what reason we have to believe these robots can reproduce is something I suppose we have to take for granted.

In all, a worthwhile play whose message only the most cynical aspects of my personality agree with (that humanity would be so blind it would accidentally destroy itself while trying to make life easier) and a traditionalist component I don’t agree with because the benefits of human progress, automation, the sciences are numerous. Something tells me Capek’s intentions weren’t so thick-headed as my interpretation, but someone smarter than I am (a not-so-high hurdle) would have to explain them to me.

I wonder what Ivan Klima is doing right now.