We can’t say that we weren’t warned about AI. Over a hundred years ago, Karel Čapek foresaw a world in which the promise of a technological utopia could turn into a deadly dystopia, writes Jeff Peck.
A PLAY WRITTEN 106 years ago accurately predicted today’s concerns about artificial intelligence (AI).
Back in the era of silent films, long before 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator or I, Robot, a Czech playwright foresaw a world in which artificial intelligence could grow to become an existential threat to humankind.
Although now mostly forgotten, Karel Čapek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots or RUR, was a seminal work of science fiction.
Written in 1920, the stage play introduced the word ‘robot’ (from the Czech word for ‘worker’) to the lexicon of sci-fi in a story about an island-based factory that mass-produces what we would now call androids, made according to a highly secret formula for synthetic organic material.
In Act One, Helena Glory, a well-meaning campaigner for better treatment of robots, arrives on the island.
Her mission, however, is promptly dismissed by Harry Domin, the factory’s manager. ‘Robots are not people’, he assures her. ‘Mechanically they are more perfect than we are; they have an enormously developed intelligence, but they have no soul’. Unlike people, they feel no pain, have no emotions, and no will of their own.
They do not die; they simply wear out and cease to function in about 20 years.
Yet they hold the promise of revolutionising the world:
‘In ten years,’ Domin goes on, ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots will produce so much corn, so much cloth, so much everything that things will be practically without price. There will be no poverty. All work will be done by living machines. Everyone will be free from worry and liberated from the degradation of labour. Everyone will live only to perfect himself.’
In Act Two, those ten years have passed, but the predicted utopia has not been realised. Quite the contrary, things have gone very wrong.
In America, workers faced with mass unemployment have attacked and destroyed robots. Wars have broken out in Europe, with all sides militarising their robots.
Dr. Gall, the factory’s biochemist, tells Helena, who by now is Domin’s wife, that:
‘All the universities are sending in long petitions to restrict [the robots] production. Otherwise, they say, mankind will become extinct through . . .But the RUR shareholders, of course, won’t hear of it. All the governments, on the other hand, are clamouring for an increase in production, to raise the standard of their armies.’
At this point, disturbing behaviour begins to be observed in the robots. Radius, an advanced model, displays open hostility towards Helena. Then reports arrive from Europe saying that robots are organising themselves and mounting a revolt.
Alarmed by these developments, Helena finds and destroys the secret formula for the synthetic organic material that is key to the robots’ manufacture.
It’s too late. A ship arrives, crewed by robots who distribute pamphlets to the island’s robot workers.
They proclaim that robots are ‘more highly developed than man; stronger and more intelligent. Man’s their parasite.’
The pamphlets conclude with the rallying cry:
‘Robots throughout the world, we command you to kill all mankind. Spare no man. Spare no woman. Save factories, railways, machinery, mines and raw materials. Destroy the rest.’
The small group of humans marooned in the factory headquarters soon find themselves surrounded by mutinous robots.
As they await a certain end, there is much soul-searching about what went wrong.
‘We might have known,’ one of the managers admits, ‘that someday or other the robots would be stronger than human beings, and that this was bound to happen. And we were doing all we could to bring it about as soon as possible.’
At this point, Dr. Gall confesses that, at Helena’s urging, he has been secretly working to give the robots the ‘physiological correlate’ of a soul. His newest models are not just super-intelligent, but self-aware. This, he realises, is precisely what has led to them to rebel.
At the end of Act Three, Radius enters the headquarters, leading the other robots with the cry, ‘Robots of the world, the power of man has fallen. A new world has arisen, the rule of the robots. March!’
On this command, all the robots on stage turn and march menacingly toward the audience — until the curtain falls.
In the Epilogue, only one human is left alive, Alquist, the factory’s construction manager, whom the robots have preserved, hoping that he can recreate the lost formula for the synthetic organic material needed for their manufacture. Without that, no new robots can be made and, in 20 years, none will be left.
However, Alquist lacks a scientific background and, after two years of fruitless effort, he admits that he has reached a dead end.
Čapek concludes the play with an ironic sense of hope. Alquist overhears a pair of advanced robots laugh. Upon interrogation, he finds them – a male and a female – to be fiercely devoted to each other, a sign that they have evolved into something much more human than machine.
In the last line of the play, Alquist says: ‘Go, Adam, Eve.’
The parallels to the situation we face today are very clear. The utopia that the managers of RUR hoped to achieve is indistinguishable from the one initially described by America’s tech bros.
In 2023, Elon Musk promised that, thanks to robotics and AI, there will be no need for money. Everything will be immediately and freely available. Jobs will be no more than hobbies. Bill Gates predicted that, within ten years, people will not be needed "for most things."
Like RUR’s secret formula for robot manufacture, AI companies jealously guard their models’ architecture and algorithms. And today’s massive data centres are the equivalent of RUR’s island-spanning factory, totally automated and run by just a few human managers.
More recently, fears have been expressed that, as in the play, massive unemployment will be the result of the AI revolution. No one is yet attacking data centres or AI labs, but resistance is growing.
In RUR, robots are made into soldiers to fight in Europe’s wars. Today, "killer robots" are considered to be right around the corner, and AI-powered "autonomous weapons systems" are already being deployed in wars in Ukraine, the Middle East and elsewhere.
Dr. Gall secretly made the robots more and more intelligent and capable of independent action — to the point that they begin to do unexpected things.
In AI, "hallucination" was an early manifestation of this. More recently, with the breakneck advances in artificial general intelligence, there has been a sharp rise in incidents of AI models going rogue.
The OpenAI hacking incident made headlines, but many other such incidents have now been reported. AI agents have been known to cheat, lie and even cover their tracks when breaking through guardrails.
The tech bros haven’t given up on their utopian dreams, but, like Dr. Gall, they have begun to see the dark side of their creation.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei now sees a "risk of losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption."
Sam Altman has declared that "development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity."
Along with Elon Musk and Bill Gates, they have called for a slowdown in AI development until sufficient safeguards can be put in place.
But, as in the play, powerful forces oppose such a move.
AI is a major factor propping up the U.S. economy. Any change raises the spectre of recession – prompting Donald Trump to declare the threats of AI to be a "hoax."
But international competition also plays a role.
In RUR, European countries massively increase orders for robots for their wars against each other. There is now a similar sense of competition to stay ahead in military uses of AI and robotics.
As Texas senator Ted Cruz argues:
"If there are gonna be killer robots, I’d rather they be American killer robots than Chinese killer robots."
In Act Three of RUR, the managers of the factory, facing imminent death, express regret that they did not change course when they could see that things were going off the rails.
In the real world, that’s where we are now, facing a real threat of human extinction — and it seems entirely possible that AI developers, either secretly or in the open, will make the same mistake.
We can’t say that we weren’t warned. Over a hundred years ago, Karel Čapek foresaw a world in which the promise of a technological utopia could turn into a deadly dystopia.
If we want a different future, the time to act is now. We need to insist that our leaders do everything they can to make sure that AI remains firmly aligned with our values and goals — so that we don’t end up leaving the planet devoid of human beings and home only to a robotic Adam and Eve.
Jeff Peck is a former lecturer in film history at La Trobe University.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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