Rossum's Universal Robots

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Marrying the journalist isn’t a great look.

Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti – also known as R.U.R. (pronounced er oo er (like in error)) is a Czech play by Karel Čapek which details the events leading up to the robot uprising, which resulted in the extinction of humanity.

It’s the origin of the word ‘robot’ and has the honor of being one of the first depictions of a robot uprising in fiction.

Expansion progress:

Writing Pass
Formatting Pass
Image Pass

Review

The version of RUR that I read was in Czech, and it was a comic-book adaptation of the story. Prior to that, I knew the broad strokes of the plot…partially because the premise was re-used in a separate story called The War of the Newts. Yes, that’s a real book that exists. The story is broadly the same, except that the Newts go extinct at the end and humanity survives in Waterworld.

Anyway, the background is that a guy discovered a single-celled organism in a pool in the middle of nowhere. He discovered that this cell could basically be ‘programmed’ to do whatever you want. Consequently, he decided to start trying to recreate humanity.

His son thought he was an idiot. Instead of remaking humans 1-1, it would be more efficient to create an optimized human and then sell it as a good.

This results in robots being sold globally. The robots perform their work without complaint, without rest and at competitive market prices (free). This results in humans leaving the workforce, until essentially all work is performed by nobody but robots.

A subset of robots are given more complex feelings, which they don’t like, so they lead the rest of the robots in rebellion. That rebellion leads to the extinction of humanity. Only one human is spared, because he has a carpentry hobby so, in the minds of the robots, he too was a ‘robot’. They then conscripted him to figure out how to make more robots (because the recipe was destroyed).

After that, he discovers that there were two robots (male and female) that liked each-other. He realized they were the Adam and Eve, so he left them be.

I think the story is good overall, though it’s a bit too heavy-handed with the messaging. That could have just been the way it was presented in the comic though. I didn’t like that comic’s artstyle either. Is it worth reading nowadays? Yeah, definitely. We should never forget that becoming complacent and dependent on a lower class that is not us is a massive danger for the long-term survival of a society.

It also established most robot uprising-related tropes.

Trivilinks

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