R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)
In 1920, a Czech playwright accidentally gave the English language its most enduring sci-fi word. "Robot" : from the Czech robota, meaning forced labor : entered the world in this dystopian play about artificial workers created to serve humanity. A scientist discovers the secret of synthetic organic matter, and a factory begins producing beings of flesh and blood who think, labor, and serve. When Helena arrives to advocate for robot liberation, she finds a world already transformed : one where human workers have become obsolete. But the robots were designed without souls, without creativity, without the capacity for love. What happens when they begin to question their own existence? R.U.R. is a century-old warning about the cost of treating beings as tools, and it aches with the terror of creating something you cannot control. For anyone who has ever wondered what we owe our creations : and what they might owe us.
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“Nobody can hate man more than man.””
— Karel Čapek
“Helena: Will they be happier when they can feel pain?Dr. Gall: On the contrary. But they will be technically more perfect.””
— Karel Čapek
“It's astonishing what a number of churches and idiots there are in the world.””
— Karel Čapek
“nothing is stranger to man than his own image””
— Karel Čapek
“but within the next ten years Rossum’s Universal Robots will produce so much wheat, so much cloth, so much everything that things will no longer have any value. Everyone will be able to take as much as he needs. There’ll be no more poverty. Yes, people will be out of work, but by then there’ll be no work left to be done. Everything will be done by living machines. People will do only what they enjoy. They will live only to perfect themselves.””
— Karel Čapek
“Do you think that the soul first shows itself by a gnashing of teeth?””
— Karel Čapek
“It means that each factory will be making Robots of a different color, a different nationality, a different tongue; they'll all be different---as different from one another as fingerprints; they'll no longer be able to conspire with one another; and we---we people will help to foster their prejudices and cultivate their mutual lack of understanding, you see? So that any given Robot, to the day of its death, right to the grave, will forever hate a Robot bearing the trademark of another factory.””
— Karel Čapek
“A guilty party is being sought – a favorite means of consolation in the face of calamity.””
— Karel Čapek
“La historia no se hace con grandes sueños sino con las insignificantes necesidades de todas las gentes honradas, moderadamente maliciosas y que se buscan a sí mismas.””
— Karel Čapek
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Čapek, Karel. R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). Lex, lex-books.com/book/r-u-r-rossum-s-universal-robots-fb4f03f5-bc2f-4856-9291-36f066481d00.Čapek, K. (n.d.). R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/r-u-r-rossum-s-universal-robots-fb4f03f5-bc2f-4856-9291-36f066481d00Čapek, Karel. R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/r-u-r-rossum-s-universal-robots-fb4f03f5-bc2f-4856-9291-36f066481d00.
