The title of this play “Rossum‘s Universal Robots” greatly influenced the later development of the common use word “Robot”. The name Rossum comes from the Czech word “Rozum” which means reason, intellect, and wisdom, and “Robot” comes from the word “Robota” in Slavic language which means forced laborer. (wikipedia) From the beginning of this play, Capek sets two topics he wants to discuss in the later story — rationality vs emotionality, enslavement vs liberation. In scene one, we know that old Rossum situated him in the role of “god”. His goal is to create “life”, the real life. However, the young Rossum was not bothered to do such “meaningless” work. His goal is only creating the machine that will release human from the tedious labor activities. We can say the old Rossum represent scientist who always questions about “what”, while the young Rossum represent engineer that always consider “how”. Domin apparently is the successor of young Rossum’s idea — the extreme rationality. In one conversation, Domin uses “bought and sold”, “worn out” while Helena uses “employed”, “die” to describe the robot. The word used by Domin and Helena also show the hints to their understanding towards “Robots”. This is the first time that the dramatic contrast between rationality and emotionality appear. Obviously, Domin already removed all the human factors from the robot in his mind.
Later, the conversation between Helena and Sulla is highly similar with the Turing Test, though Turing developed this test concept in 1950. In my opinion, Sulla speaks in a very machine-like way which represented by all the data and detail information she includes in her words, but still, Helena thinks she is a “woman”. In the “Uncanny Valley” Masahiro Mori claims that the “affinity” is decided by the “human-likeness”, and “human-likeness” largely depends on the appearance and movement.(Mori) One the first stage of uncanny if one thing is unhuman like its human-like character will be enlarged by human inspection and vice versa, so people’s affinity will rise and drop. In the second stage when the human-like character takes dominant place, people’s affinity will rise again. In the setting of R.U.R, Sulla’s appearance and movement are very human-like so that during the conversation Helena formed a strong affinity with Sulla.
When Domin introduced the spinning-mill to Helena, we can see that Capek’s imagination of the robot’s working logic is still based on a combination of early mechanical principles and the alchemy. The robot prototype in this play seems to develop towards the trajectory of bionics rather than the robots we are familiar today which operated by the integrated electric circuit. Thus, robot-like Sulla and Marius are more like the biorobotic android which is at the second summit of the uncanny valley theory. Due to the technical difficulties, the robots nowadays are mostly stylized which goal for “a moderate degree of human likeness and a considerable sense of affinity”. (Mori)
Domin claims that “man will once more be free of labour and anguish, and his only task will once again be to make himself perfect, to become the lord of creation”. When human is free from the physical work, their laziness will gradually be satisfied which will result in the degradation of the entire society, and the life separated from working is the true ending for the human civilization.
Helena asks Domin why they create the female robot when gender has no meaning for the robots. In the premise of this story that robots are produced as labors, it is most likely that male will be their default gender setting. However, the present robot and AI culture have a clear feminine tendency, and I think such change happens due to the service requirement of robots in the different era.
Radius is the first robot that developed to have self-consciousness. In the beginning, robots will stop working only if the siren was ringed, so at this stage, they do not have desire or self-consciousness. However, when Radius asked Helena to put him into the scrap machine and said the words that rationally against the existence of human, he is awaked from the “enslavement”. From this waking moment siren for robots is no longer the signal of being controlled, it is the signal of attacking.
“R.U.R.” Wikipedia. August 26, 2018. Accessed September 04, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.
Karel Capek. “R.U.R.”Accessed September 04, 2018. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/capek/karel/rur/contents.html.
Masahiro Mori. “The Uncanny Valley.” IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE, June 6, 2012, 98–100. doi:10.1109/ MRA.2012.2192811.