The Riddle of the Robots

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The Riddle of the Robots1



The riddle.



In 1993, I made a journey to Chicago, an excursion with some colleagues and graduate students to visit the Chicago-Kent School of Law and other institutions related with my own research area, computers and law.



During the stay, we visited the Art Institute of Chicago. And there I made a remarkable discovery. In its collection I discovered a small three-dimensional figure made of cardboard.2 The head is reminiscent of a cathode ray tube; the body is made up of boxes decorated with numbers, the feet are two tubes. Anybody would interpret this figure as a robot, and this is indeed the name of the artwork. The artist is Alexandra Alexandrovna Exter, and she made this small figure in 1925.



It was the date that puzzled me. "Robot" is a rather recent word. It was used the first time by the Czech author Karel Capek (1890-1938). Capek was an important and profilic author, famous for his many novels and plays. Many have read War with the Newts (1936), which is a very funny and very serious science fiction novel ridiculing the emergence of the Nazi movement, and indicating Capek's strong political involvement.



His play R.U.R., which is an abbreviation for "Rossum's Universal Robots", is also of a political nature. In this play, the main character is Rossum, an industrialist who creates artificial beings from biological material in order to have slaves in his production plants. There is a description of the process of building these beings:



'Spinning mills for weaving nerves and veins. Miles and miles of digestive tubes ... in the fitting-shed, all the parts are put together like motorcars. They learn to speak, write and count. They have astonishing memories. But they never think of anything new. Then they are sorted out and distributed. Fifteen thousand daily, not counting a regular percentage of defective specimens which are thrown into the stamping-mill ...'


It is maintained that the idea of such a play came to Capek rather suddenly, and that he immediately discuss...
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