Karel Capek, the playwright of R.U.R., or Rossum's Universal Robots (1921), wasn't a scientist like Issac Asimov or Arthur C. Clark, both of whom came along later to redefine and streamline the modern concept of robotics in fact and fiction, but he was still a concerned intellectual living in a changing world. He was the first to coin the term "robot", but his concept of the word differs slightly from what modern audiences associate with it. To Capek, the term merely meant an artificial human, almost a golem from Jewish mythology, created by humans through rapidly growing knowledge of science and technology and destined for a short lifetime of servitude and dismissal. To a modern audience, a robot is an entirely mechanized creation, lacking organic substance and composed entirely of artificial elements. The creation of robots in his play borders on the mystical, the alchemical, and the unknowable, which may have been how the advent of science looked to those people living in the early part of the century. Science was taking humanity to new and frightening places, and the increasing mechanization of the workforce and the rise of military technology in World War I gave the future a grim face. To Capek, the ability to create a life solely through the use of new technology was a terrifying prospect, both for what it meant for humanity's future and for what it would mean to the things which were to be brought to life. Capek feared that humans would become both neglectful tyrants and ineffectual antiques if a new class of inhuman worker drones was to be created, and he was deeply concerned about what it would mean to the everyday human to be replaced by this new class.
Modern robots are mechanical structures formed of inorganic materials and pre-determined programming. Most modern robots cannot perform tasks or learn new skills unless they are programmed with the ability to learn. Most robots are not programmed to do this, or are programmed to learn in a very limited way, and science fiction films and books are full of examples of robots and computers gaining sentience and taking over the world. Capek's robots are organic constructions, supposedly made of the same or similar biological substances as human beings and seemingly lacking in what a computer-age scientist would recognize as programming. To modern eyes, Capek's robots are closer to clones or androids than to mechanical robots, and are really more frightening because of it. Helen, upon her arrival on the island, cannot distinguish the robots from the human workers and scientists who live on the island. He deliberately leaves the process behind the robots' creation vague, letting neither the audience nor the robots themselves know what the source of life really is. Left in ignorance of their origins, the robots have no history, no culture, and no way to find autonomy from human rule. They are forced to obey their human creators and exist in a state of almost feudal serfdom and dependency. Capek did not believe that such a society, where the underclass relied so exclusively on the upper class for protection and procreation and where the upper class relied so heavily on the lower class for consistent productivity and obedience, could function efficiently for long. This is especially true for a society in which the oppressed underclass, in this case a very inhuman and dehumanized underclass, begins to grow a very strong, and very human, desire for autonomy and the right to exercise free will. By claiming the right to enjoy basic human freedoms, Capek's robots move themselves up to be equals with their human creators. In fact, the robots are almost humanity's superior in that they are faster, stronger, and smarter than the average human. However, without the ability to procreate without human ingenuity, the robotic race has little chance of survival. This almost complete dependence on humanity prevents the robots from fully achieving autonomy. Even in the ending scene where the robots Primus and Helen discover love, it is uncertain whether they will manage to find the secret to propagating their species. Capek leaves their fate vague, allowing the pair to journey into the future beyond the play either to die alone in a wilderness devoid of humanoid life or to found a new Garden of Eden for future generations of artificial life.
Though Capek may not have feared the robots themselves, either of his own brand of or the mechanical variety that followed, what he did fear was humanity's reaction to the creation of robots. He believed that the invention of robots would make it far too easy for humans to give up toil and struggle, which have classically given humanity its definition. Human society is not equipped to deal with a majority of humans who have no jobs, no need for work, no jobs at anything approaching a 'lower level' and nothing to do with copious amounts of spare time and energy. These elements have sparked countless labor strikes and protests, and have led to violence against the offending class on many occasions. Robots may make a life of luxury possible by taking the detestable, unwanted jobs no human should condescend to do, but without a severe restructuring of human society those humans who would normally be forced to take those jobs would have nowhere to turn to, no one to help them, and nowhere to place their frustrations except on the class of cheap, efficient, inhuman workers who replaced the more 'deserving' human laborers. The same arguments have a long history of creating violence and hostility toward Irish American immigrants, people of African descent, or in contemporary politics against Mexicans and Mexican American laborers, as well as many other groups around the world. Perhaps Capek was attacking capitalism by highlighting these growing frustrations in the human community. When a business cares more for cutting production costs than for creating a job market for human workers, humans are placed out in the cold so robot laborers can produce more items faster and for less money than the old outdated model of humanity. The robot underclass is just one more victim of human prejudice in this case, one more instance where greed, fear, and resentment come together to spark a war not of ideology or resources but of hatred and desperation.
War may have been another of Capek's concerns. He wrote the play shortly after the end of World War I, where new advances in modern technology were put to use on the battlefield, leading to devastating results for the human combatants and even those people who never saw a killing field. Medical technology had also advanced to a point where soldiers could survive the infections that would usually follow an injury, so they were able to walk, or crawl, off of the battlefield and tell tales of the new horrors of war, tales of machine guns and air raids and miles upon miles of entrenchments, bare fields, and barbed wire with an enemy on the other side. War had reached a new brutality unmatched by the bloodletting of the past, and to Capek and his contemporaries technology was to blame. Capek's robots may look human, but at least initially they really were little more than machines, built with a specific purpose in mind. Among the various reasons why robots could be desired is the possibility of sending the robot to war rather than a human soldier. Not only is a commander assured of obedience, but an artificial soldier would not feel fear, nor pain unless it was the pain warning of injury, nor anxiety about preserving its own life. A robotic soldier is the perfect soldier, and the perfect replacement for the human soldier. However, if that perfection was to be turned on a civilian human populace, the devastation would be incalculable and, of course, perfect. Capek, along with a number of other writers in the early and mid part of the century, feared that humans were creating technology they would not be able to control and would ultimately be the undoing of humanity. By replacing human soldiers with robotic ones, humanity would be saving generations of young men and women from shell-shock, death, and battle scars, but without some element of humanity in the robot warriors, war would become even more horrific and devastating. Even if warfare should avoid conflict with humanity at all, the havoc caused by battle would disrupt daily living for humans. Travel, food distribution, even politics would be affected by the creation of a war that has no need to end. When all of the soldiers can persevere despite conditions that would break down even the heartiest of human warriors, and when the soldiers can be replaced with relatively little difficulty or expense, whatever forces and motives behind the war effort can push on more or less indefinitely. With no human cost, the only issue is acquiring the resources to continue the manufacturing of robot soldiers to throw at the enemy's gates, possibly for the reason of acquiring the resources to create even more soldiers. Such warfare would begin a dangerous cycle of violence that would be exceptionally difficult to break, especially in a world of growing technological capability where the manufacture of these robots would become easier with every successive year.
Capek's concerns did not come to pass in the way he feared they would. Many factories switched to mechanized labor with relatively little violence from disgruntled workers, and human soldiers still fight and die on the frontlines of a dozen different wars every day. Modern robotics has provided humanity with a number of comforts as well as inconveniences, but adaptability to an ever changing environment is merely another part of humanity's ability to survive almost anything, including, mostly, itself and all its clever ideas. Capek's play addresses humanity's attitude toward itself as much as to any burgeoning relationship toward advancing technology. He believed technology, while dangerous in the wrong human hands, would ultimately rely on human goals and ambitions to actually be dangerous. After all, robots must be programmed for their tasks, and if a robot cannot learn how to program another then it is up to a human creator to set forth a robot's tasks and goals. Now the field of robotics has advanced to the point where there are robots building other robots, but there are humans involved in manufacturing every step of the way. Perhaps this isn't quite the future Capek envisioned when he sent Primus and Helen into the unknown in R.U.R., when he foresaw either robots wiping themselves out along with humanity or robots surviving alone after the destruction of the last human. Rather, it is a future where humans and their robotic creations live more or less harmoniously, at least for the time being, and few of Capek's fears have truly come to fruition. Nonetheless, his play still stands as a formidable warning to those who care to think about what human abuses of technology could lead to.
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