R.U.R.—Karel Čapek

Don't you worry one little byte

Not many science fictions make it onto the Decade Project. But this 1920 play by Karel Čapek did, as well as his 1936 novel, War with the Newts. In R.U.R., robots take over the world, a theme that has gained a lot of traction recently with the explosive growth in bioengineering, robotics, and artificial intelligence.

The title, R.U.R. stands for “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” and everyone who says anything about the play points out that it introduced the word “Robot” into the language. The English word comes from the Czech word for a type of serf. However, people don’t always talk about the name of the inventor, Rossum. According to Adam Roberts, the editor/translator of the edition I’m using, “Rossum” comes from the Czech word, “rozum,” meaning “reason.” So one can’t go too far wrong by thinking of the subtitle as “All-Purpose Slaves to Reason.”

The play takes place on a remote island nation where Miss Helena Glory, the daughter of the country’s president, visits R.U.R. headquarters to interview Harry Domin, the company’s general manager. She there encounters Robots for the first time and learns about them and the history of the company. In a few comic encounters she mistakes Robots for humans and humans for Robots. Clearly, Čapek’s Robots resemble what we would now call androids rather than what we normally think of as a robot. These Robots have hearts, intestines, and skin, all made from organic yet synthetic materials. The manufacturing process does not involve growing robots like clones but rather assembling them from organic parts, like IKEA people.

DOMIN: … I will show you the kneading trough.

HELENA: Kneading trough?

DOMIN: The pestle for beating up the paste. In each one we mix the ingredients for a thousand Robots at one operation. Then there are the vats for the preparation of liver, brains, and so on. Then you will see the bone factory. After that I’ll show you the spinning mill.

HELENA: Spinning mill?

DOMIN: Yes. For weaving nerves and veins. Miles and miles of digestive tubes pass through it at a time.

HELENA: Mayn’t we talk about something else?

Written in 1920, R.U.R. predates almost all of the real science that fuels our present anxiety about human extinction. Watson and Crick would not publish their work on the structure of DNA for another thirty years. The first desk model of an electronic adding machine would only appear in 1961. I. J. Good’s famous paper warning of the potential dangers of superintelligent machines would appear in 1965. Stanley Kubrik produced 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1969.

Čapek got the future science mostly wrong. So to look at R.U.R. as a warning about AI or genetic engineering half a century before those disciplines even existed, misses Čapek’s point entirely. Admittedly, his dystopian vision looks a lot like more recent ones, but I think his inspiration came from a combination of Marxian economic theory and the emerging cult of efficiency, as expounded in The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), the sacred text of Taylorism.

To quote from Taylor’s book, “The enormous saving of time and therefore increase in the output which it is possible to effect through eliminating unnecessary motions … can be fully realized only after one has personally seen the improvement which results from a thorough motion and time study ...” Taylor took an engineering approach to management. Rossum did the same for anatomy.

DOMIN: Well, anyone who has looked into human anatomy will have seen at once that man is too complicated, and that a good engineer could make him more simply.

…

DOMIN: So young Rossum said to himself ‘A man is something that feels happy, plays the piano, likes going for a walk, and in fact, wants to do a whole lot of things that are really unnecessary.’

HELENA: Oh.

…

DOMIN: What sort of worker do you think is the best from a practical point of view?

HELENA: Perhaps the one who is most honest and hardworking.

DOMIN: No; the one that is the cheapest. The one whose requirements are the smallest. Young Rossum invented a worker with the minimum amount of requirements. He had to simplify him. He rejected everything that did not contribute directly to the progress of work—everything that makes man more expensive.

After learning all about the Robots, Helena confesses that she came to R.U.R. under false pretenses and actually represents a group called the Humanity League, who have as their mission the liberation of all Robots. But it turns out that Robot liberation at this stage of their development makes no sense. They want nothing, not even their own survival. So despite their superiority to humans in almost every way, they have no interest in doing anything but following orders.

Act Two takes place ten years later. Helena and Domin have married and R.U.R. has filled the world with Robots until they now outnumber humans a thousand to one. Dr. Gall, head of the experimental department, has introduced a new model, and we meet a male prototype named Radius. Unfortunately, Radius hates humans because they don’t do anything useful, which makes humans unnecessary. Even more unfortunately, unlike earlier Robots who could only follow orders, Radius can issue orders and he has organized the Robots to revolt. At the end of the act, the revolution to eliminate the useless human begins.

In Act Three, later the same day, the desperate humans have come up with a strategy for survival. Despite the intelligence of the Robots, it seems they wear out quickly. Even the highest quality Robot wears out within twenty years. The plan? Sell the secret of making Robots to the Robots. Rossum’s notes contained the secret; however, unbeknownst to them, Helena had burned the notebooks in a tidying frenzy. So the Robots overrun the last stronghold of humanity and kill all but one person, a Mr. Alquist, head of the works department, whom the Robots spare because he does useful work with his hands.

In the epilogue, Alquist’s efforts to rediscover the secret of Robot building have failed, but it turns out the new male and female models can reproduce, and Alquist renames them Adam and Eve. A happy ending—at least for Robots—except that the class distinction between masters and slaves continues.

Čapek pokes fun at a lot of things. In one easy-to-miss exchange, Helena asks Domin why he named his female Robot secretary Sulla. He had also named one of the male Robots Marius.

DOMIN: Isn’t it a nice name?

HELENA: It’s a man’s name. Sulla was a Roman general.

DOMIN: Oh, we thought that Marius and Sulla were lovers.

HELENA: Marius and Sulla were generals and fought against each other in the year—oh, I’ve forgotten now.

At one level, Čapek ridicules those scientists, engineers, and managers who have no interest in anything beyond their limited areas. But at another level, he points the audience toward a historical parallel. The Social War (91-88 BCE) which involved both Marius and Sulla arose from the allies of Rome seeking Roman citizenship and equal rights, much the same sort of thing the Humanity League had sought on behalf of the Robots in Act One and which the Robots would later seek for themselves in Acts Two and Three.

This history of R.U.R. as related in Act One directed Čapek’s satire at the engineer’s worship of efficiency. But in Act Three, at the height of the rebellion, when all looks lost, we see this encomium to punctuality.

HELENA: Then … everything’s … all right?

DOMIN: Practically everything. I believe they’ve cut the cables and seized the radio stations. But it doesn’t matter if only the timetable holds good.

HALLEMEIER: If the time-table holds good, human laws hold good; Divine laws hold good; everything holds good that ought to hold good. The time-table is more significant than the gospel; more than Homer, more than the whole of Kant. The time-table is the most perfect product of the human mind.

Čapek also ridiculed the opponents of women’s suffrage (in early 1920, Czech women finally gained the constitutional right to vote). In the following passage from Act Three, the men take a vote about whether to destroy the secret of making Robots or sell it to the Robots.

DOMIN: This is a fearful decision. We are selling the destiny of mankind. Are we to sell or destroy? Fabry?

FABRY: Sell.

DOMIN: Gall?

DR. GALL: Sell.

DOMIN: Hallemeier?

HALLEMEIER: Sell, of course.

DOMIN: Alquist?

ALQUIST: As God wills.

DOMIN: Very well. It shall be as you wish gentlemen.

HELENA: Harry, you’re not asking me.

DOMIN: No, child. Don’t you worry about it.

As an interesting note, Karel Čapek's play premiered in 1921 at the National Theater in Prague. In 2015, almost one century later, it got another performance in Prague, in which robots programmed by high school students played all the roles.

Next week, I’ll try to tackle some sonnets and other writings of the early Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch (1304–1374). I have just purchased The Essential Petrarch, which looks like an excellent collection of his writings edited and translated from Italian and from Latin by Peter Hainsworth.

Amazon links to works mentioned in this post.

RUR & War with the Newts, by Karel Čapek

2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrik

The Principles of Scientific Management, by Frederick Winslow Taylor

The Essential Petrarch, edited and translated by Peter Hainsworth

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