We’ve been afraid of the robot uprising as long as we’ve had the word “robot,” a word that made its way into English from Czech in the 1920s. A robotnik is a slave; robota, forced labor. But it was by way of a play, Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.), that the anglicized “robot” came to us as meaning a man-like machine.
I recently saw the play put on by the Resonance Ensemble at the Beckett Theatre in New York City. Mounting R.U.R. now seems particularly timely, as the first real robot revolution is upon us.
As always, we live in fear of the robot. Today it is not so much that the Siris of the world will grow tired of our trifling requests for nearby restaurants and weather reports, but more so that technology will continue its creep up the skill-ladder, swallowing the remaining blue-collar jobs as an appetizer for white-collar work. Our fear now revolves around the fact that technology is now encroaching on more and more human labor, but our hyper-enlightened system for distributing its benefits is nowhere to be found.
Once the realm of science fiction, the fear is now manifest across our stateliest publications (and available in big pools of links here and here). In December 2012, Paul Krugman speculated on long-term problems facing the American economy, and one of them was a rise of robotics contributing to an on-going shift of income from workers to owners of capital.
Publications such as The Atlantic and Wired have both published stories on how the human workforce is nearing obsoletism. Not just those of us doing repetitious or “mechanical” tasks will be replaced. But as Wired’s Kevin Kelly warns: “It doesn’t matter if you are a doctor, lawyer, architect, reporter, or even programmer: The robot takeover will be epic.”
Most in the West have the reassurance that the next jobs being phased out by robots have already been outsourced to other countries, where low-tech, old-fashioned human labor was cheaper.
Even here, robots are creeping in to take these least pleasant of jobs. Foxconn, makers of the iPhone and quite a bit human suffering, are bringing in more than a million robots to supplement and replace people. Terry Gou, Foxconn’s chairman, described the rationale behind the new robot hires in typical Foxconn fashion. “As human beings are also animals,” Gou stated, “to manage one million animals gives me a headache.” Which is such a terrible thing to say, that you really hope the robots can and will replace everyone at Foxconn, so no one has to work for this man ever again.
Playwright Karel Capek was going to call the artificial workers Labori, but the name struck him as “too bookish.” His brother, the painter Josef Capek, suggested “robots,” instead. It’s not too surprising then, that the robots in R.U.R. feel like a pretty thinly-veiled metaphor.