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Welcome to the New Books Network.
I'm Professor Stephen Dyson, and in this episode of our series on artificial intelligence, we discuss Karel Capek's 1920 play Rosson's Universal Robots about an AI takeover.
I'm Professor Jeff Dudas, and we wanted to take a deep dive into this formative work in the robot rebellion genre, which is at the root of so many of our contemporary stories about artificial intelligence.
How did Capac's play popularize the word robot, as well as found the genre of AI uprising, leading directly to works such as 2001, Blade Runner, The Terminator, and Battlestar Galactica?
How does it matter that Capac embedded his story of the dangers of inventing artificial life within a series of ideologies?Nationalism, Fordism, capitalism, and communism.
And what should we make of the profoundly religious undertones of the play's stunning ending? Rossum's Universal Robots, Carol Capek's 1920 play, takes place on an island.
And on this island, all we're really told about the island is there's a whacking great factory on the island, which is the titular Rossum's Universal Robots.Rossum is, well, there's a Rossum the Elder and Rossum the Younger.
They are founders of the factory, which has a patented process for creating artificial persons, or what are rather famously known in the play as robots.
And so one claim to fame of this play is that it's a play that's written in Czech, and the question arose for the playwright, what do I call these creations, you know, the like automatons, artificial beings, and he came up with this word robot from the Czech robota, which the etymology of that is it
depending upon which translation you look at, it can mean slave, labourer, or I think the one we're most fond of, serf.And a serf being... Forced labourer.
Yeah, a forced labourer, but someone who's less kind of, what is it, less committed totally in life, long than a... than a slave to their labors?What is the distinction?I mean this is a, is it not a Russian or Eastern European term primarily?
It's a laboring system that links in greater and lesser degrees a person to property and to land and I think it varies depending upon which historical context and which geographical context we're thinking about.
But serfdom simultaneously signifies one's class place, where one exists within a class system.And it also signifies some, as I say, greater or lesser association with a particular bit of property.
And it instantiates people at the bottom end of a relationship with an owner.
OK, so this factory is turning out, is making artificial people, and the term that's being used is roboto with the connotations that we've described.
What happens to kind of disturb the equilibrium on this island in Rossum's Universal Robots is Helena Glory, who is described as President Glory's daughter, though President Glory is never actually described.
And I did wonder, is he president of the corporation?Is he president of a country?I mean, what was your take on that?
I had the sense that he was a political figure.OK.But we don't know, to your point, we don't know which nation he is supposed to be president.We don't know what kind of geopolitical system exists at this point in human history.
We are told this is the near future.So it's conceivable that—I think there are a variety of ways that one could persuasively understand. the role of Helena Glory and who she is.She's a president's daughter.
Yeah, and she visits the factory and says, you know, I'm President Glory's daughter.I'd like to be shown around.And it turns out she's the representative of something called the Humanity League, which is this sort of humanitarian organization.
And she's, you know, rather crucially, the word Humanity League is quite important here because she is concerned with the human rights, quote unquote,
of these artificial persons, these robots, these serfs, these slaves, however we're translating that word.And that sets in motion is a series of events.And I don't think it's a, you know, can you spoil something from over a hundred years ago?
I think we're going to have to run that risk.What happens is it turns out there is a sort of revolution going on internally to the robots, where they're becoming more and more conscious of their place in the world.
She has some role in forwarding their consciousness and trying to make the argument that they should be accorded more rights.And anyone who has seen any of the numerous works that R.U.R.
is clearly, Ross and Universal Robots, is clearly in the background of and clearly inspired, like Blade Runner, Terminator, Battlestar Galactica, a million, you know, iRobot.
Anyone who's seen any of those works can kind of figure out what's going to happen once these robots
you know, once the robots increasing understanding of their underprivileged position and their increasing sort of acquisition of faculties that are more and more human collides with the different goals of their human owners and those humans who are trying to advocate for rights, there's obviously a collision coming.
There is a collision coming.It's also, I think, important for us to note that these robots have been designed with a critically important distinction from their human overlords and designers, which is that they've been designed without a soul.Yeah.
So these are robots who have advanced intellectual capabilities, clearly have advanced technical and workmanship types of capabilities as well.It's work skill sort of abilities.
But it had turned out that equipping these kinds of robots with a soul was just too difficult to do.
And so the Rossum the Elder had sort of driven himself mad trying to figure out how to make essentially perfect replicas of humans in a kind of a godlike status. And Rossum the Younger, his son, was much more of an engineer.
And so Rossum the Younger is portrayed as sort of approaching this problem of creating robots from the perspective of the technical how-to engineering problem rather than from the pose of trying to imagine oneself or putting oneself in the place of God who makes life.
And so this, what ends up happening over the course of the play is that it seems like sort of by stages that are sometimes obvious and sometimes unclear how this is happening, that these robots are gaining, it's not that they're gaining consciousness necessarily, at least as I read it, it's that they're gaining little bits of a soul and of emotionality.
And in particular, one of the hinge points appears to be a point at which The designers of the robots decide to endow them with the ability to feel pain, which they had not yet.
This appears to be like the sort of the big hubristic mistake that the humans make because it's exactly this endowing of the robots with a soul, with the full scope of emotionality that human beings have and with critically the ability to feel pain.
This appears to be the trigger that leads to the robot uprising and rebellion.
Yeah and one of the, I mean we've touched on a lot of points there that we're going to have to unpack here, but one of the key things I think that's going on in this text that's absolutely central to contemporary understandings or debates about artificial intelligence is this debate about the material and the ineffable.
the thing that you can create and sort of pick apart and put back together, and the thing that is maybe the most important thing, but you can't actually point to where it exists or where it resides.
And the question of the soul is the key point there, right?At one point, Helena says to Dorman, who is the sort of manager of Rossum's Universal Robots, How do you know that they don't have a soul?
Well, of course, you can rather crucially make the same argument about human beings.And this has been a massive contemporary debate in philosophy, in physiology, and psychology, right?That at some level, what is a human being?
It's just a set of kind of electric, in a brain, just a set of electrical impulses.And you can point to the part of the brain that does one thing, the part of the brain that does another.
But to suggest then that a human being was essentially equivalent to a constructed object, It's just the construction materials will be slightly different.To some people, that's unbelievably blasphemous.I mean, almost literally in a religious sense.
To all humanistic people, it seems a mechanical reductionist view of what a human being is and what a human being's worth is. To AI engineers, this is actually, as I understand it, such a perfectly reasonable comparison.
One of the founding principles of artificial intelligence is what's called substrate independence, the notion that all thoughts are, and all cognition is, and all impulses, and desires, and emotions, and feelings are just information.
And they're just transmitted by electrical impulses.And the substrate upon which those are based could be biological, as in human beings, or it could be mechanical or electrical, as in artificial intelligence.
But ultimately, it doesn't make any difference.They're just parallel systems with arguably equal capabilities.And it's just an engineering problem to render one equivalent to another.
And RUR, without understanding any of that technology or without having direct experience of any of that technology, has rather prophesied or presaged one of the fundamental philosophical and technical debates about artificial intelligence today.
And what I think the play does so interestingly and so well is that it really fixates on this boundary breakdown between the robot and humans in the same way that you have been just embedding within a more sophisticated technological story.
The play leaves its audience not really understanding at a deeper level what the actual difference is between the robots and the humans.The robots are not equipped with a soul.
However, they are otherwise so sophisticated and so capable and so much a kind of a mirror image of their human creators, that these robots are constantly passing what we talked about in our last episode is the Turing test.
They're constantly capable of convincing or fooling human beings into believing that they are human.And we see this – I mean the first act of the play in which Helena Glory comes and arrives at the factory.
The entire first act is this series of confusions that she is portrayed as having with an inability to distinguish, first of all, who is a robot.And then, so she initially confuses robots for humans, but then later she confuses humans for robots.
And it turns out that the entire play ends up being this sort of identity confusion or this collapse of boundaries between the human and the inhuman.
And although we've been promised at the outset that the way that you distinguish between these two entities is that the one has a soul and a full emotional life and the other does not, it turns out that it is nowhere near that simple to put that distinction into practice and to use it as a persuasive method for distinguishing the two entities from one another.
So much so, I think, that it's not entirely clear at the end of the day that our main characters, Domen the lead sort of manager of the factory.
And Helena, it's not clear, I don't think, whether either of them are themselves human, although we're supposed to be led to believe that that's true.I think there are lots of potential clues and hints that they might be robots as well.
So there's just this kind of massive boundary collapse and boundary confusion that is in many ways the primary theme of all of those later texts that you were referring to.Blade Runner, Battlestar Galactica, Terminator.
What is it that makes people, people?And is it possible to distinguish that from a replica, or famously in Blade Runner, a replicant?Or does it even matter?And one of the things I think that was really interesting about RUR is that
I'm not sure that at the end of the play, I think we're left with the question, does any of this matter?Does it actually even matter that you've got humans and robots?
Or are both human life and its robotic analog, are they both pointing towards apocalypse?
Right, right, yes.Sort of doubling and boundary collapse is absolutely crucial.I mean, rather importantly, these robots are not
although they work in a factory and that leads you to think, well, they're just, you know, here's the head and we screw it on and you open them up and they've got gears and wires and all the rest of it, that they're artificially, sorry, they're organic beings, right?
Like they're just artificially grown from some kind of goop that Rossum, since Rossum's great discovery was this kind of goop that would lead to life, which is, although RUR I think is an original, maybe the original AI rebellion text, that notion of creating artificial beings from organic goop,
It's super, super old.It's as old as it goes, exactly.Like weird alchemy and, you know.
This goes back to the books of Genesis.Yeah.Or the book of Genesis and those multiple origin stories in the Christian Bible.This is God creating man and woman out of clay, or out of the earth.
This is man, this is God creating woman out of the rib of Adam.This goes back to other traditions as well.This is the gods creating human beings out of clay.
There are tons of Native American origin stories in which animals create human beings in the same way, out of straw and clay and dirt. The artificial creation of humanity and the consequences of so doing are...
a concern that is as old as recorded human history.
Yeah, yeah.And this kind of mistaking robots with people and people for robots that Helena goes through in the first sort of act of the play, it's played at the time as sort of a comedy, right?It's essentially a farce, right?
Oh, you thought I was a robot and I'm actually a person.But it's a really profound sort of philosophical point.
I think it might be the key to the, to the whole play, you know, because the, the, the way that the play goes, and I'm going here off your comments that does it really matter at the end of the day, who's the robot and who's the human, the play ends with two robots
who are essentially, who are amongst the last living things on Earth, right?The humans are all done for by the robots, the robots doing the humans.
And then the robots themselves find, well, we've actually destroyed our own ability to, we can't procreate and we've killed all the humans who might be able to tell us. And the robots wear out.And they wear out, so they're all dying off.
So there's very few people, there's maybe one person and two robots, or a lot of robots left, but two primary robots are left, who fall in love with each other.And that's demonstrated by their willingness to sacrifice each for the other.
And they're explicitly referred to in the last lines of the play as Adam and Eve, a new Adam and a new Eve.And I think it's... perfectly possible to read this play as a sort of retelling of the Genesis story.Clearly that's what's going on.
But also, who is to say that this is the first cycle?It really seems cyclical to me.And this is something that
that was the end of Battlestar Galactica, for example, you know, the big revelation at the end of Battlestar Galactica is actually the created beings were themselves our ancestors on our earth and we're constantly just living this cycle of the creation of life from artificial to organic.
But at some point that distinction just doesn't matter anymore.I mean, what you're left with, with the players, the notion that Primus and Helena, the two robots, are going to go off and re-propagate the species.
And surely, at some point, they would stop thinking of themselves as secondary or artificial creations.They are, in fact, the natural and proper creations.
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reading of the play, and it becomes especially sharp, I think, when we imagine some of the other things that are going on in the background and sometimes the foreground of this play, which is that
The play is organized according to these sort of destructive, self-destructive tendencies of humanity.
The obvious self-destructive tendency is to create artificial life, but to do it in a way that's haphazard or unclear, which then escapes the command and control of the human creators.
Which is the contemporary fear of AI, right?Exactly.
But it turns out there are lots of other self-destructive tendencies embedded in this play as well.
This is a play that has a lot to say about the self-destructive tendencies of capitalism, for example, and particularly advanced capitalism, which, you know, as you might want to talk about, is frequently organized according to these Fordist logics of production.
It also, it seems to me, is a story about the potential self-destructiveness of a kind of a nationalistic organization in the geopolitical system.
And it harkens back as well to the sort of self-destructive tendencies of people who imagine themselves as lighting out into some unoccupied space or lesser occupied space and trying to remake a kind of a community there.
You've got these – it's almost like the cycle of self-destruction is layered at multiple points with a whole bunch of potential different impulses, which just leads us to believe that in the end, the new Adam and Eve will likely themselves find some self-destructive set of capabilities to engage in.
which just keeps the whole thing going.
So I think that's an absolutely crucial point for thinking about the AI alignment problem.The AI alignment problem is
commonly portrayed as the difficulty of creating something that's super capable and artificial intelligence and keeping it aligned with human goals.So it doesn't go off on its own and ultimately like kill us all.
Well, in RUR, the sin of humanity is not really the creation of artificial life.It's all that all the other thought constructs that are prevalent in 1920 when CapEx writing this playwright.So Fordism and the assembly line, right?
The reduction of humans to pure labor with just, they're just functionally utilitarian, almost literally cogs in a wheel.
Cogs in a wheel.Hurtinized roles.Right.You stand at the At the assembly line, you do a single job over and over.And that's your life.
That is the value of your life and the boundaries of your existence as recognized by your employer and by extension, the state and the community is your capacity to do this boring, repetitious job.
Capitalism more broadly, you know, that the robots are being sold, bought and sold.I mean, that's how the play opens, right?
Is Dorman is dealing with problems in delivering robots and some new orders that are coming in and just buying and selling of labor.They've overproduced.Yeah.
In the same way, right, that for example, the kind of classic Marxist critique of capitalism, which is this kind of unrelenting tendency towards overproduction, which ends up being famously in Marxist phraseology, it means that capitalism ends up being its own gravedigger.
We see that here as well.They're making way too many of these robots.They don't have anywhere near the market that could satisfy this sort of supply and
It's precisely because they've overproduced so much that humanity gets wiped out so easily when the robots do engage in rebellion.
And they're able to overproduce because they're using hyper-efficient fortis principles, which are very good at producing stuff, but less good at cultivating kind of sensible, sustainable, long-term strategies of existing within the world.
Atheism is sort of indicted, right?Rossum the Elder is portrayed as solely and purely motivated by a desire to prove either that God doesn't exist or that God has been supplanted or is irrelevant, right?
Because now I'm creating, I can create life, so what have you got to do with it, God?That's indictive.
Yeah, there's that hubristic. element.He imagines himself and creates the scenario under which he himself can be the creator of life.
Nationalisms.There's a lot of talk about it.Clearly the island exists sort of out of time and space, but the only part of the outside world with which it interacts is a Europe that is riven by war and by nationalisms and militarisms.
And the play is written in 1920. at the very end of what was then, by a category difference, the most catastrophic set of armed conflicts in human history.
And so you've already got this overwhelming kind of despair that's floating in the air and this sense of apocalypse because, in fact, vast stretches of the globe were sort of apocalyptically rendered as a result of of nationalistic folly.
It's essentially like a super naive, a bit flighty.I mean, this is a person who arrives on the island seeking to free the robots and then within about 10 minutes has decided to marry the factory owner and then that's kind of to the wayside.
And then she does a series of things in secret that are sort of apocalyptic, which is the classic critique of idealism.
Right.And isn't that naivete, isn't that the charge against Woodrow Wilson's effort at the League of Nations, for example.
Yes, that's always the dichotomy that set up the realists and the idealists.And the idealists have good intentions but bring about the apocalypse because their intentions are sort of totally unrealistic about the way that the world operates.
And all of these things are central ideologies that are circulating in the first half of the 20th century, particularly when this play is written.And
It's these ideological systems that are humanity's sin, not necessarily the creation of artificial life.And what they mean is that when artificial life is created, it's going to be created or polluted by these human systems.
And it's these human systems of thought as they are reproduced in the robots that bring about the apocalypse.
Right.It's the materiality of the robots and of the human drive towards creation and production exists within this series of contexts.
It exists within an already constructed world, an already constructed world according to a whole series of modes of thought and practice.And so the play, I think, is sharp, as are a lot of
are fictional accounts of what happens when humans innovate technologically.The play is really sharp and these texts are really sharp on insisting that technology does not exist in a vacuum.It does not exist time out of mind.
It is created by embodied, historical, cultural people, people who are embedded within particular contexts.
And so it is very natural to understand that the technological decisions are going to also share, or at least display the evidence of the times and the peoples who make them.
And so the alignment problem, which is seen as aligning AI with our values, well, actually, if you solve that problem, that's arguably a bigger problem.That's what RUR is saying.
The most terrible thing would be to create even more capable beings that actually think like us and act like us, because we think and act in stupid, self-destructive ways.
Right.And so maybe the way to think about this is not how do we align AI with our values, but how do we align our values with the AI? Yeah, right.
Because the two, I mean, what these texts really do a good job of showing is that there is this kind of reciprocal relationship or dynamic relationship between the technology, the things that we make, and what we make of that.Right, right.
No, I think that's true.And the kind of last point I wanted to bring up was, was almost a generic point about about literature and RUR begins with a stage direction that says, like, setting an island, time, the future.
And that's a clear allusion, I think, to the tradition of the utopia, which was always set out, it's like no place, right?The good place that is also no place, a place you can't find on a map in a time that you can't quite pinpoint.
And it's, you know, the 20th century, in the early 20th century, is the time that the dystopia decisively, you know, displaces the utopia as the central speculative fiction tradition.And R.U.R.
is a really crucial text, I think, in this moment, because you have this utopia, or this set of utopian, apparently utopian impulses that is embodied in the mission of R.U.R.
you know, Domin the manager keeps articulating this sort of design for life for humanity where the robots will do all the labor and the working person won't have to work anymore and will exist without the sort of crushing burden of labor.
The island is not sort of discovered by a traveler from the outside world, but the island is like exporting, literally in the form of the robots, its utopian impulses.
And yet these utopian impulses, once they meet the real world of actual workers who don't want to be displaced, or governments who actually would quite like to have not only disposable workers, but also disposable soldiers,
that they become very quickly dystopian.And then the robots themselves bring the dystopia back, sail back to the island and kind of ransack the palace.
And it's almost a literalization of that displacement of the utopian dream with the dystopian nightmare.
Right.Yeah, I think that's exactly it.And the other way in which this is a a familiar placement of the utopian impulse is that, you know, we're talking about the imagination of a space that is uninhabited, it is, it becomes an other
in a certain way to the European space, which in this text is defined as one of, you know, as you just say, this desire, this unending desire to do less work and to have other people fight your battles for them.
Better to have robots kill each other than human beings kill each other.But the utopian space is, it's never open and empty, right?It always exists primarily in the minds of the people who invent it.
and bring their own fears and desires to that space.And so, of course, this utopian island is going to be occupied with polluting factories.Of course, it's going to overproduce, right?
It's simultaneously a kind of a safety valve from what is imagined to be the real dysfunctions of European life.But also, it's pitched, at least ideally, as a place where humanity can get right with itself and can do these things
You have a leisure life, essentially, which is what Domen is promising.But those things can't escape.By design, they can't really escape the dysfunctions of the home world.
The periphery doesn't escape the dysfunctions of the core, because the periphery is in part the imaginative projection of the dysfunctions of the core.
So that's it for our discussion of Rossum's Universal Robots.There's lots more to come in our ongoing series about how AI is reshaping our societies and so if you like this content, please subscribe.
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