Rossum's Universal Robots (R.U.R.)
Rossum's Universal Robots (R.U.R. ), written by the Czech author Karel Capek, is one of the earliest tales to address the topic of robots. It is a utopian story of a society in which humanoid robots are developed to help humans. The robots end up, through no fault of their own, becoming self-aware and deciding for themselves that humanity is cruel and must be eliminated. Originally intended to be soulless automatons to do the work while humans are freed from their labors and allowed to focus on bettering themselves.
The Influence of R.U.R.
Discounting all the expository writing, which is kind of necessary as Capek is introducing the world to a new genre of writing, science fiction, R.U.R. seems like the story upon which a lot of modern stories about robots were based. After you boil down all the complex soliloquies and expository writing in R.U.R., the basic plot is very simple; “Humans bad, robots good.” This theme was carried along in a lot of stories about robots written since R.U.R. The plots of many science fiction (sci-fi) stories that have robots in them harken back to the basic plot of R.U.R. set out above.
The "Humans Bad, Robots Good" Theme in Sci-Fi Movies
Looking at a few sci-fi movies over the years, it is easy to see the “Humans bad, robots good” theme. The 1984 sci-fi thriller “The Terminator” introduces us to a killer cyborg who returns from the future to wipe out the leader of the human resistance while he is but a child thereby wiping out the resistance itself. In the backstory, the future is dominated by self-aware robots led by the all-controlling Skynet central computer which unleashed Armageddon in the early 21st century by taking control of all the computer systems and launching nuclear missiles all over the world virtually wiping out the entire human race. This is sort of the ultimate “Humans bad, robots good” kind of movie.
Another movie with a similar plot made in 2004, “I, Robot” tells a very similar story to R.U.R. where a corporation, United Robotics, with a greedy CEO with ulterior motives, was out to make robots so ubiquitous that humans would become dependent on them completely. However, “The Father” and creator of the robots feared what his robots had become and programmed one of them to get the attention of the police for killing him and thereby putting him on the trail of the corruption within United Robotics and sees the robots central controller V.I.C.I become self-aware and reprogram all the robots to “control” the humans and “protect” them which leads to chaos only aborted when V.I.C.I. is taken offline.
R.U.R.: Exploring Human Themes
R.U.R. has another theme which is much more human. R.U.R. was written in 1920, not too long after the Communist Revolution in Russia. One of the basic tenets of Communism is that the worker must overthrow the factory owners and take over the government themselves. In R.U.R., the robots are the workers and Domin is the factory owner. The humans are very exploitive of the robots and they eventually become aware of this and overthrow them led by the first self-aware robot Radius. The “overthrow” in R.U.R. involves killing all humans except for one, Alquist, which the robots see as sort of a kindred spirit because he is a worker in the factory that made them and, and more practically, they had to keep at least one human alive that knew how they were made, or at least that’s what the robots thought.
Conclusion
Overall, the story of R.U.R. is very interesting because Capek’s bold step into a genre that was in its infancy at the time was very risky from a writing standpoint and because it set up a lot of the canons that are still found in science fiction stories today. It is more likely that Capek saw the play as an opportunity to make money than to introduce the world to the concept of robots.
