178: R.U.R.

Are your school days out of sight? When you took English, art, and math, what's your favorite Fahrenheit? How sour are the grapes of wrath? Do you need a challenger? Poor disgusting Salinger. Do you love the written word? What happened to the mocking? Our show is just beginning So find a place to sit These questions will be on the test It's time for Sophomore League

Welcome back to Sophomore Lit, where we reread your 10th grade reading list. I'm John McCoy, and with me is returning co-host John Syracuse. Hello, I'm happy to be back doing my homework for Sophomore Lit.

Why don't you introduce yourself again? It's been a while since you've been on the podcast. Oh, goodness. Well, these days, I'm actually a full-time podcaster. Last time I was on the show, I wasn't, but that's what I'm doing now. I've got a tech podcast called Accidental Tech Podcast at ATP.FM. I've been on the show. a lot have been on the incomparable many, many times.

over the past decade or so. I've also got a podcast called Robot or Not, which is relevant to what we're going to talk about today. And then finally, I have a podcast on Real AFM called Reconcilable Differences. So I got a lot of podcasts. Well, congratulations on escaping the rat race.

Well, I'm not sure I've escaped it, but I'm in a different rat race. Self-employment is a different kind of rat race. OK, so this time we are doing something relevant to robots. We are doing Carol Chapex. I don't know if I have that pronounced right. Carol Chapek, the Czech, the Czech playwright that everyone knows. We're doing his 1920.

play RUR, which stands for Rossum's Universal Robots. And yes, this is the play that brought the word robot to English and actually to a lot of languages around the world. You gave me the e-book version of this that I read for the show. but it was not originally written in English, right? The play was not written in English? No, no, it was written in Czech. It was written in Czech. It was originally performed in 19... 21 in the former Czechoslovakia, newly formed because Czechoslovakia, I think.

formed in 1918. The translation that we read was actually the translation, the Selver translation, which was not an authorized translation. It was done in English. And it was done from an early version of the play. So there's some things that are technically not in that translation, but it's the one that's in public domain. So, but in Czech, is the title of it still R-U-R? Is it just a coincidence that Rossum and Robot and Universal have the same beginning letter? I believe it is R-U-R, yes.

But it wasn't, yeah, it was Rosumovi Universalian Roboti. And please, my Czech listeners out there, please write in and correct me. And the word robot, he coined, but he coined it from a Czech word for manual labor, the kind of labor that you give to peasants. I'm guessing. Well, so this is I know we're getting well off track in the meta commentary here, but like.

So this is the introduction of the word robot. But of course, it's the introduction of the word that you just said in Czech. So somebody had to translate that Czech word into English. And whoever chose to translate it as R-O-B-O-T. They're the one that coined the word we're talking about right now, right? I don't. I think it was. I think it was robot in the original check. I'm not sure. It was spelled the same way, R-O-B-O-T? Yeah, because it comes from this word robota, which is...

which is, you know, to labor. And so this is sort of like a, you know, this is sort of like Robotnik. It's like... Oh, so Robotnik is like the plural? Like the... Yeah, I think that is the plural.

We should have had a Czech speaker on this episode. Well, anyway, robots. So the first question I have for you is the obvious one. Are the robots in this?

in this play robots or not you know the thing with plays and we're going to go off another meta commentary a bit about plays but the thing with plays is they have the words that the people have to say and occasionally there's some simple stage direction But if the people don't say it, like, for example, describing the composition of the robots in this play, there's not a lot of detail.

I'm going to say probably not. Almost certainly not. But I'm not sure they go into enough technical detail because there's obviously there's nothing to see when you're reading a play in a movie. Maybe you could look and see. Do they seem like they're robots? But. I don't think the robots in this play are robots in the sense that we understand that word today, but I can't definitively say that because the descriptions are so weird and vague. Well, I think they're much closer to...

Androids, I guess, is what you would think of them. They they seem to have they seem to be made of some sort of an artificial biological compound that. at one point is described as being kneaded in vats and then they're assembled. And they are assembled in much the same way that people are assembled. They have bones and internal organs and skin. But the engineers make a big deal out of the fact that they are much more efficient than people.

Yeah, it does seem like a biological type of thing because there's some squishiness involved. Certainly the play written in the 1920s, I would imagine, you know, there's no there's no computer chips in any way for them to put into the robots and the electric. available at the time or were not like this isn't kind of like a uh metropolis style thing where it's clearly a mechanical techno type of robot these seem to be a little bit more squishy and biological right well this is also uh

prior to the discovery of DNA. So people's understanding of biochemistry was not very good. It's kind of amusing that in the play... Rossum, who isn't really a character in the play, he's a sort of a historical figure by the time the play comes around, is the guy who discovered robots. And he isn't interested in creating a servo. servile class of laborers. He wants to create animal life because he wants to prove that God doesn't exist. That's sort of a lot of what 19th and early 20th century.

naturism was. It was like people were reacting to Darwin and either agreeing with him or disagreeing with him. And there were people like Louis Agassi here at Harvard who had this idea that somehow they were going to... prove that Darwin was wrong. I don't know how they thought they were going to do it, but everyone was in a race to do that. Yeah, well, when... You know, the thing with Darwin's ideas and the time they arrived is I feel like it was hard to it was hard to fully embrace them.

Without much more detail about the mechanisms, kind of like not so much the mechanism of like natural selection and stuff like that, because that was well described. But like. It's like, OK, yeah, but how like how does what we clearly see happening, how does that come about? You know, you know, like I said, the knowledge of DNA, the cells, all these things like.

You could kind of see that they were there, but they didn't understand as much about how they work. And so it did seem like, all right, well, so this is happening, but there's got to be some kind of hand wavy magic going on here. This play is very similar in the way that it treats the creation of. the robots lots of hand-waving just you know matter-of-factly suffice it to say

This old person did this and now we're continuing and there's vats and they have bones and skin and they're, you know, it's just it's it's very hand wavy because what other detail could they get into? There's no they didn't even they didn't even really venture a guess as to. how these fictional things might work because no one knew how any of the real living things worked either. Right.

I find it interesting, though, that from the get go, from the from the very get go of this concept of whether it's. mechanical or biological, but the concept that you are going to build your labor force and it's going to do your bidding without pay, without Any ability to object. There is also this concept that those.

These servants are going to eventually become too smart and are going to rebel. I also like that from the very beginning, the engineers in this really sound like a bunch of tech bros. You know, they really sound like, yeah, we're great. We did this thing. We're going to change the world. And the one female character in the play is saying, well, what's going to happen when people don't have jobs anymore? And they say, oh, yeah, it'll be something we'll have to work out.

Yeah, there's I mean, it's hard to tell with things that are this old, how many of like the tropes that we now accept in this type of sort of genre fiction like originated here or maybe a little bit earlier. But. They hit all the highlights. I mean, I guess going on was Mary Shelley Frankenstein before or after this? Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was before this. Yes. Yeah. So just a little bit of like, oh, you know, technological advancement.

And what humans can do with it and using it to essentially assemble something human like or machines to change the face of society, because that's what they're seeing all around them and all the dangers of that. And should we be trying to do it? And what about the hubris and the.

the sort of uh oblivious engineer or the the oblivious person making the creation they just want to know they just want to do it and they're so proud that they did it and they don't think about the consequences and that's what all the fiction is about but yeah a lot a lot of hand waving especially in the beginning of this to just set up the premise before before more tropes start landing with the you know inevitable uh robot uprising and uh you know

Again, too much, too much change, too fast with too much technology and it ends poorly for everybody. And that's the lesson. But yeah, I mean, like I said before, like this being a play. This was a bit of a struggle for me because A, I generally don't read plays and B, reading a play leaves out a lot of stuff. Like there's a lot of descriptive stuff that's not there that might be in a science fiction book. And.

Even just sort of like, you know, especially in something this old, trying to figure out, as I will get to, I guess, when we hit the plot points. What is the intention of this scene without seeing actors or without reading authors descriptions or narration or commentary of any kind? You just have the lines of dialogue and anything this old is going to seem weird and absurd.

to me as a person living in 2025, but is it intended to be weird and absurd? Which things are clearly supposed to be humorous and absurd, and which things are not supposed to be, but just seem that way to me from a modern perspective, and the play does not help me there.

There's no other surrounding context, you know, again, with, you know, seeing actors on the screen or seeing the author is omniscient third person description or something to give me clues about which things are supposed to be funny and which things are just unintentionally funny.

I think it was trying to be funny. I think there were several things that were kind of telegraphed as jokes. And the other thing that is I found difficult, I guess, reading this is there are six. executives at this factory are you are that are running around and they feel sort of interchangeable. There's not a lot of difference between their personalities. They give one sort of like mood to each one. Like Dr. Gall is like the smart one and he's cranky.

and there's the mechanical one who's burly and Alquist is like the depressed one. It's like a boy band. He's the cute one. He's the, you know, bad boy. Right. And the instigating event for the play is the arrival of this woman, Helena Glory, who is trying to... trying to bring, trying to liberate these robots. She feels like she's going to come talk to the robots. She's going to give them the Bible. She's going to discuss

labor with them and surely they will they will uprise. But the guys at RUR don't really care because they say they're not going to do anything. And whenever robots get a little bit out of whack, they develop this. kind of a frothing at the mouth, you know, malfunctioning. They just have to be scrapped then for parts. The stamping machine. Yeah. So that's the very first act, the arrival of what's her name? Helena, right? It's clear that there is part of the dividing is up into like the.

contemporary in universe like when people who are watching this play in 1920 what they were supposed to be getting from that scene and then what i'm getting as a modern person so i think the people the the contemporary audience 1920 was supposed to be getting all right the lady shows up on the island

The scientist dudes fall over themselves because she's a pretty lady. They have a scene in there where she takes off her veil. I don't know why she was wearing a veil. But anyway, she takes off her veil like what a beautiful woman. Right. So everyone is wowed by the beautiful woman. And you and you laugh at the humor of them falling over themselves because the woman has arrived and she's got a point she's trying to do her whole crusade type thing by being a little bit sly, but not really. But.

The way act one ends is with this thing where it's like, you know. what's his name the the the main dude um domen domen yeah domen domen whatever uh is like well now you of course you must marry me because they're just so he's so bowled over by her beauty proposed his marriage on the spot which maybe is less absurd in the 1920s than today of proposing marriage upon meeting someone would immediately label you as, you know, not in keeping with current.

cultural customs surrounding marriage and courtship. But back then, maybe less so. And then when she's like, oh, well, you know what? She's taken it back. I can't. I'm not here for that. And she says, well, you if you don't marry me, all the others are going to come in and propose to you in turn.

because apparently everyone in this island all these scientist men have decided they're all going to propose marriage to me to this woman and he gets first shot because he's the most senior and basically at one point i think it's something like well you've got to marry one of us Right. And yes, that's funny, but I do feel like the there's a different level of the absurdity of it in terms of.

Those darn boys or boys will be boys are laughing at these guys falling over themselves versus from a modern view, it immediately objectifies the woman and. Some of it is funny, but others like, well, you've got to marry someone like what? What other choice do you have? That's your role in our society of 1920 is to get married because you're a beautiful woman. And these are the available men. So pick one.

And it's interesting. And the reason I think about it is because this play, as you noted, sets her up, this one female person, as the one person who. sees that what is going on in this play technologically speaking is probably not a great idea and will lead to bad ends so she is given the role of the smart wise person

but treated by everyone in the play, not like that at all, and does end up getting married and spends most of her time being a wife and being dismissed by the men. So I was of two minds about the whole thing. I just could not believe how... Act One ended and was wondering if it was supposed to be that everyone thinks all the characters in the story are terrible immediately.

Except for the woman who's just a victim of the world that she lives in. Well, if you do go outside of this play and think about what else is going on in 1920, this is when the Marx Brothers are... performing on Broadway before they do their first movies. And I think of this as that kind of really nutty. Comedy. It is. I do think it's supposed to be read as ridiculous. And I do think that everyone is supposed to be.

presented in the broadest of terms, partly because I think that JPEG doesn't want this to be. a terrifying play. He wants this to be a silly play that he hopes will maybe make you think about things. So it's more like a Monty Python version of the end of the world than it is. an H.G. Wells version of The End of the World. I think that, I think it is, it is trying to be silly. And I do think that the models for Helena are, you know,

In 1920, that was the first year that women voted in America after the 19th Amendment. And so she has, I think, in her. She has the suffragettes. She has the temperance movement. She has all these. These these pro-social humanist causes that were often led by women in the early part of the 20th century. But then but then she's immediately subsumed.

by traditional gender roles. And it's like these ladies, they'll want to vote and talk to you and have ideas, but you just marry them and then they shut up for the next 10 years of the play. Right. Well, I think that everyone in this play treats. everything as though it were inevitable.

All of the as things start to go wrong, the engineers all say, well, what else could we do? Yeah, they also treat as inevitable things that don't come to pass because they were very often assert that this concern.

you have don't worry about it it's not a thing it'll be fine and they end up being wrong almost every time they say that but they're like well this happens no problem we'll just do x y and z it's like you don't worry about robots they're just things when anything goes wrong you put them in the stamping machine everything will be fine like they have

They're very sure of what they think is going to happen. And then when it doesn't happen, they don't revisit that and have self doubt. They're just sure about whatever the next thing is. And eventually, yes, they end up being sure about things that do happen that are bad. I do feel like the tone really shifts in the third act.

Even though it's supposed to be silly, like everybody dying is not. I don't know. Maybe they were trying to play it for laughs there, but it's just like, I don't know. Well, I do think that it does become a little bit more, things do become dire by the end. But honestly, I don't think Chapek is particularly interested. in the actual question of what would happen if there were artificial people that were forced to labor for people.

you know, doing this all allegorically. He's, you know, this is also the era of early communist ideas. I don't think that this is a communist play, but it does. take some of Marx's critique of capital and the robots stand in for the working class that is expendable, replaceable. And the expectation is that everyone was just going to go along with whatever the captains of industry say, because they're the ones that are smart. And as the as the play goes along.

It's telling that as they try to figure out what they could possibly do to keep the robots in line, they all start... speculating that what they really should have done was make the robots have different ethnicities so that they would fight amongst themselves. Instead of universal robots, they need to make national robots.

if they could just make these robots racist they just need a wedge issue yeah although it's it's very clear that they're not actually interested in the sci-fi aspect of like we should be careful when creating artificial life even though that's what seems like the play is about because like they're

Their understanding of an interest in maybe it's understanding founded in the 1920s, but their understanding of an interest in the way large tech companies and technological advancement would eventually work. Don't factor in because. One of the premises of this entire play is that this company, this, you know, the RUR, making all these robot things. It's a single company run by five people.

that essentially destroys the entire planet and everybody has to buy the robots from them. And there's never a thought that like, look, that's not how it happens. One person figures out how to make a bomber.

they don't sell bombers to the whole world everybody else figures out how to make a bomber by copying the person who figured out how to make a bomber and then everybody makes their own bombers and repeat for nuclear weapons or any other type of thing but in this fantasy world the idea is like well if you come up with the idea and you start a company of making this world changing thing.

You will be the only company in the entire like the armies would have invaded and taken over this place and killed all the people and taken the robot factory immediately because it's such a powerful force for change. But that's not what this story is about at all. So they just say, oh, yeah, no, they're just there.

doing their thing boats come and go uh they sell everyone has to buy the robots from them which is just it's like that's not the way any kind of capitalism or technology ever works especially world changing technology and capitalist system but for the play to work, you have to allow them to be...

You know, the rest of the world just got to go to them to buy our robots because everyone else is buying the robots and we got to buy the robots. They're going to make you a gazillionaire because, you know, you're the only ones who can make it. And you six men will just stay here with your one woman. And that'll be how it is until the end of the world.

world amen um and so that's that was the clue to me that that they're not interested in the sci-fi premise they're much more interested in for story purposes like i said for allegory purposes we need You know, a never ending supply of these interchangeable, exploitable labor things. And so we're pretending this one company makes them.

What did you think of the the end of the play? Because I thought that I thought that things got a little bit weird with the what they call in this in this edition, they call the epilogue, which is. actually just like another act i don't know why it's called an epilogue but um i i i have my own feelings but i was curious to know what you thought of it so i think the play despite its

mostly disinterest in the ideas of robots and, you know, don't do this with technology and don't play God or whatever, can't avoid it entirely. So they touch on it throughout the play. Like one of the highlights I put in was. A discussion.

I think it's a domain quoting somebody else who was saying it's absurd to spend 10 years making a man. If you can't make them quicker than nature, you might as well shut up shop. Like the idea is you're making expendable things. But if you if it takes you as long as it does to create a child and raise a child, then what the heck? the point of this technology, right? And they occasionally touch on things like that, talking about the sort of value proposition.

of the product that they have and then obviously the whole like oh they foam with the mouth and put them in the stamping machine but some of them seem to have ideas and at the beginning they're indistinguishables like very much like the blade runner scene of like you know she gives the test uh do like our owl blah blah blah

but she doesn't know she's a replicant. And this one varies people like Helena doesn't know that she's talking to robots because they seem so human like, but then eventually she figures it out. Like they keep touching on that as they're going through the story. And the epilogue in particular is like, all right.

we've told our story but also we now we've decided that not the real moral the story of the real lesson but one of the things we want to touch on is like oh and also if you make these things um They're the whole conflict at the end is about like, you know, our what do you call it? Our ace in the hole is kind of like the lysine contingency in Jurassic Park. They can't make more of themselves. Only we can do that because we have the secret.

And they'll eventually die of old age. So they need this. So that's the linchpin. But then if two robots learn to love each other, then through the power of love. Now you can make small robots. And they even talk about like way earlier in the thing, like Helena asks, like, why do you manufacture female robots when sex means nothing to them?

And Doman says there's a certain demand for them, you see. Servants, saleswomen, stenographers, you know, things only women can do. I just added that last part, but like... they side skirt the sex bot part of it entirely but in the end the power of love is what allows

the the biological robots to start reproducing and what does that have to do with the rest of the play it's it really is that's why i think they call it an epilogue it's like and our story is done and all the humans are dead and the robots are still there and the formula is gone but they learn to love and the lesson is machines learn to love and replace us i don't know

Well, I don't know that they're going to go off and have kids, though. I think that's the thing that's strange about it. In the last act, there's only the one guy left, Alquist, who is the depressed guy that you mentioned. He's an operations guy. He's not like a scientist. And he's a witness to the end of the world. He's still there. They want him. The robots want him to give them the thing they don't have, which is the ability to reproduce. But like his last line at the end is go.

adam go eve the world is yours i i'm assuming they're reproducing now because they love each other because they care but because they're it's romeo and juliet well if you die then i'm gonna die and if i die then you're gonna die i want to sacrifice you you want to sacrifice me they've learned to love and therefore the world

is theirs. The world's not going to be theirs if they're all just going to die of old age. You know, all these robots realize that the formula for making more robots has been destroyed. Sort of... carelessly by helena in the last the second it seemed like that was her intention it was what she did what i'm saying is she she didn't she didn't think it through she she she wanted to do it because she wanted to stop the production of of more

robots, but she didn't think what the outcome would be with the conflict between humans and robots. The robots are asking Alquis to... to find out how to make more of them. And they're demanding that Alquis basically... perform vivisection on other robots so that they can to figure it out and he's trying to say i that i was just one part of a team that did this i don't know how to do all the parts of all that all the dead people did

That is played a little bit for horror. You know, Alquis doesn't know exactly what to make of these robots that are left. All through the play, the engineers have been demanding that these robots have no sense of self-preservation. that they have

internal thoughts or desires or ethical sense. And now he's being confronted with these robots who desperately want to live. And I think that it's the fact that he sees the robots are capable of having affection for each other that makes them at the end think, well, you know, they are people. And he sends them off into the world, but I don't know what they're going to do. I still don't think that they can reproduce. I think that everyone's going to die out.

couple of decades anyway but well they have learned to love though because that's the whole thing of like he's gonna do the vivisection and the two of them that are in like a relationship and the one doesn't want the other to do it and they care about each other and he sees that he sees that you know because

They want to learn from this, but these two are, you know, they're, you know, no take me, no take me because they're in love with each other. And that's why he calls them Adam and Eve. Yeah, like it's. And again, getting back to technology, which is one of the things I just focus on because it seems so sci-fi is the understanding of what it would take to create something like this is very much kind of in the alchemy vein where you just pour things from beakers.

And combine elements and use fire and squish stuff together. Right. Like kind of. It's much more like woodworking than microbiology. The way you assemble a steam engine is the way you assemble a person. It's just a little tiny bit more complicated. So the people, the men who are doing this... A lot of them are mechanically skilled, like you'd have a, you know, a...

a skilled silversmith or something or somebody who makes watches or whatever. And that's basically it. Those are the skills you need to make living beings. And, you know, I feel like at the early days of the, you know.

uh the 1900s it must have felt like yeah just you know this but like accelerate a little bit more and so we're you know we're making certain things today and you know like fast forward a little bit we'll be making people no problem like and you can see where they come but this is you know like going from like the right brothers to the moon and like uh whatever it was 50 years or 60 years or whatever it does seem like there's a big acceleration they just

didn't really anticipate how much of a gap there would be between going to the moon and artificial humans. And so all of the all of the plot based drama around. creation of these in particular like oh now we need we lost the formula it was written on a piece of paper and now that we don't have the paper and no one remembers it no one can do it the sort of idea of like scarcity of information and no no sort of like scientific breakthroughs that are widely understood versus...

I figured out a clever way to make this part of the clock or whatever. And I'm not going to tell anybody or I'm going to get a patent on it. And I will tell people, but charge them for it. Like, that's the level. And I go, well, we lost the formula. And so there's no fundamental science underlying these artificial beings that.

will go on forever or like the entire world knows instead it was just those papers that were put in the fire and now and that's why he's plugging away at it at the end he's like well i'll just try this and i'll squish that into this and do this into that and i'll cut this thing open and look at the insides of it

say hmm this little squishy thing goes here and that thing goes there let me try that and you know it's just it's really it's a kind of adorable in one way but like you said it's also kind of horrible because you know the

The barbarism of like, how do we learn about human anatomy or cutting open cadavers and didn't really know how anything worked, but we know this squishy thing is here and this thing goes there and this seems to be important for this and so on and so forth. And yeah, that's the level of that's the level of technology that this story works on.

I think whenever you read really old science fiction, I'm always impressed by the fact that people make predictions, but they seem to have... The raw ideas about what the difficult things to do would be, you know, they they they make a big deal out of certain things that seem trivial to us. But then the like. I think about like the time machine and HG Wells just basically says, oh, all you have to do is create a device that will accelerate time.

And you're going so fast through time that you won't bump into anything in between because you're just occupying that space too quickly. And, you know, I remember thinking like, no, that's that's not no. But I'm very focused on the parts of the understand, like the machinery of the time machine and not so much on the accelerating time part, which is the really important part of the time machine.

This is hand waved away. It's not so much about the portholes and the levers and the switches. That's not really the hard part. Speaking of other science fiction writers, Isaac Asimov did not like this play. And I bring this up only to say, because I don't think I'm ever going to read Isaac Asimov on this podcast. always thought that the laws of robotics, which was his big claim to fame, were so stupid. The idea was we will make robots perform ethically.

by telling them not to hurt humans. But they're hand-waving away all of the ethical concerns determining what it means to... harm a human? Who is a person who gets these rights? What actions are hurtful? It's really begging the question in the sense of it's easy to not do evil in the world. All you have to do is be good. Especially at a time before, you know, we had large language models that could at least provide this assimilation of thought.

I don't know what I don't even know how you begin to program that into a robot's behavior.

Yeah, I'm not that familiar with Asanoff other than watching the Foundation series on Apple TV, which is fun. But it seems to me that, I mean, my vague understanding of his... stories surrounding those laws of robots is that it is in many ways, perhaps primarily.

I set up to have books where robots break the laws, like literary device to, you know, it's not so much being taken seriously as I've discovered these great laws for robots. And this will work out as the idea of like, oh, these laws of robots that is totally not going to work out. It's not.

the intention seems like i think it has to be a good enough idea to maybe look that's great if you could tell them to do this that's a good set of laws and they'll be fine like they won't hurt us and they won't through their inaction cause any harm to come to us and then seems rock solid then you keep reading

you're like oh looks like it wasn't looks like there were some flaws in that plan a whole bunch of flaws and they go through them all and to your point about like the what defines harm like this is one of my annoyances with a lot of the uh

discussions around self-driving cars when they were first arriving the idea of like well what if the car gets into this situation what should it do And, you know, it's it's it's very much like the LLM thing or as I recently said on podcast, like the pet rock thing, like people are so ready to imbue. An animated spirit of consciousness into anything. A pet rock.

a self-driving car an lm because it's not that so much we're so easy to fool it's that we want to be fooled like this whole religion is based on the idea that everything that the tree the stick the rock the lake It has a spirit inside it. I think there's a whole scene in Return of the Jedi and Empire Strikes Back about the very idea like.

This is not this is a concept that is irresistible to human beings. Right. And so the idea that there's some part inside a self-driving car that is ever going to in any particular instant. See a situation before them. Recognize and identify, you know, the one grandma on this direction and then the five kindergarten kids in this direction. and then make a value judgment about what to do.

hit the one grandma or the five kindergarten students is like 75 logical leaps away from reality like you're so far left behind like before you even get to the idea of like so you think this self-driving car can predict the future and knows that if it turns the wheel this much the future will surely be that harm does or doesn't come like it's one of my annoyances i understand like the trolley problem is more of a hypothetical exercise but one of my annoyances with that when people try to sort of

grounded in reality is like there'll never be a situation where you know for sure what the future will bring including one where they say well if you make the train go this way it hits these people make the train you don't know if the switch is going to work you don't know if that thing's hooked up to anything you don't know if the people are going to move out of the way you don't know if you're misjudging and they're like

there's just too many unknowns and you're a person who's lived in the world your whole life you're not a self-driving car that is just taking a bunch of sensory input as numbers and producing a bunch of other numbers and and has no understanding of grandma or kindergarten students nor does it try to understand and predict what will happen in the future so yeah sorry for this big aside but yeah the laws of robots just like

it just it makes so many assumptions before you get to the point where the laws are able to be applied and again for storytelling purposes you just hand wave hand wave hand wave suffice it to say this is the laws as the robots understand them and they more or less work but yeah you're right like

you know, it will not harm a human. What is harm? What is human or through an action and cause harm? What, when will your inaction cause harm? Oh, so you know, everything that's going to happen everywhere in the universe, depending on what actions you choose to do. I don't think so. Like that's not.

You're not a future of the universe predicting machine because that's the only way you can make these kind of decisions. You know, like all they have probabilities, like C-3PO tells you the odds of surviving the asteroid field or whatever. But it's just it's.

It's so distant, but we want to get to that. We want to get to that meaty center of like these ethical decisions. And we don't want to think about ever having sufficient inputs for the ethical decisions you made. And in those ways, plays like this from 1920s. help because it's everything is basically magic.

It's like there's no founding in technology and they're not interested in warning you about the dangers of creating artificial humans because they know that's not a thing that you can do. So it's more fantasy writing than sci fi. Or like you said, an allegory where the robots aren't really robots. It's just they're all there.

all the laborers of the world and the scientists are the the men pulling the strings or whatever but but never sort of like grappling with um uh the the effects of technology despite the fact that this play again keeps coming back to it like well i think at one point they're discussing like what they what their goals were and it's like to

Essentially, what do they say from one of my highlights, which the Kindle app is now not going to? Yeah, it's it was not an evil dream to shatter the servitude of labor. The dreadful and humiliating labor that man had to undergo. Work was too hard. Life was too hard. And to overcome that, like the idea of being freed from all the work that we have to do by making something to do the work for us.

And that's not what this whole thing was about, but that's always an idea that's in the air for any technology. Once we have computers, we'll have so much leisure time because computers will do all the work for us and we won't have to, you know. do any work ourselves and that's also not how this ever has worked out from the uh you know the the printing breasts to the cotton gin to anything else um

In the end, there is a seemingly unlimited pool of work that needs to be done. And when we make machines to help some of it, we just go find other things to do. Well.

So there's a lot of things you said there and a lot of points I could make. I just wanted to mention your frustration with the trolley problem. I'm married to a professor of philosophy. I will I will tell you, most philosophers find that to be a meaningless. problem for exactly the reasons that you give although it's probably good for like a freshman class though it gets that it piques their interest yeah i mean it piques your interest but the thing is when you when you create

When you create mind experiments, the trouble is you have to create a mind experiment that has that behaves with the rules of the universe you're in. Otherwise. You might as well be like making the mind experiment of what happens when you meet a unicorn. You know, it's like it needs relevance. And it needs like even if it's like allegorical or whatever, it needs relevance. The thing that you will learn.

from grappling this, needs to be relevant to things that you will have to do in the real world. Right. And there is no world in which you have perfect knowledge of everything. Or even just very direct consequences of what you think will probably happen. Everything is always wishy-washy and there's very... And honestly, dealing with our ignorance of outcome is... is really what a good ethical system is based upon. For example, you don't drive drunk not because you know that you're going to crash,

but because you know it's very possible you could crash. It increases your odds. And how much does it increase your odds? And is the amount worth the blah, blah, blah? It makes you come to the decision of like, I... can't make those calculations and can't they can't come up with any series of weights such that i know when to decide so it's much easier and simpler and more straightforward and more effective to just say i just won't drive drunk ever Well, that's far off from RUR, but, you know...

it isn't that far off though like i said like it doesn't seem like this thing wants to deal with that but every once in a while they keep dropping in these nuggets like they like so many of the tropes of like i've created these machines and then they rise up and take over and how do they feel about being things and are they real people that's all throughout this but it's always like throwaway lines in between these farcical comedy scenes between the scientists

One thing that I did find very funny was how in the second act, we're deep into the play at that point, but now everyone's speaking in exposition. Partly to make these philosophical points, there's this line Helena has, you remember, Harry, when the working men in a...

America revolted against the robots and smashed them up. And when the people gave robots firearms against the rebels, and then when the governments turned the robots into soldiers, and there were so many wars. And I just love that as a...

as a device you know it's like all this stuff happening off off stage you remember the plot of these three sci-fi movies that plays over in america remember when that happened and their reaction is like yeah you know it happens it happens you know they use the robot They employ the robots in the army. Then the army fights the people and they put down the rebellion. But now the robots have guns. You know, it's just the same old.

What are you going to do? See, but this is silly. And this is why I think that the play is at heart a silly play. And that goes, that garners a lot of goodwill for me. If it took itself... too seriously, then I would start to complain about it in the same way that I complain about the trolley problem. I guess the trolley problem is okay as long as you realize that you're dealing with something that is...

Just a fantasy. Yeah. another part where i was trying to figure out the tone of like at one point one of the robots is saying um this radius is saying i don't want a master i want to be a master i want to be a master over others and helena says oh sure they'll put you in charge of lots of robots and radio says i want to be a master over people and they're like

You're mad. Is that a laugh line for the idea that the audience would think that a thing, that a machine would be master over people? Because that's not played as a laugh line in more modern sci-fi. That is the crux of half of the robot uprising things, which is like. Or the X-Men series of the bad guys like we are. We're superior to you.

uh you know so we should be ruling over you if your whole idea of like survival of the fittest or whatever we're the fittest you suck we're better than you we are masters over you whether we're robots or mutants or whatever uh and Isn't that terrible? And so be careful what you create, because if you create something smarter than you, you know, whether it's Skynet or.

uh whopper or uh you know magneto uh you end up being enslaved and so they have this scene here but i think they're playing it for laughs they certainly don't dwell on it too much and this is like i think this is like in act one and it's like anyway That will happen in this story. They're going to kill everybody because it's it's so I guess it's just the obvious thing to do. Like, oh, well, you've created a thing. Then, you know, this it's it's so interesting to see even the 1920s is like, well.

You create artificial people. They're going to take over and kill everybody. And again, this is not what the story is about. Maybe much more about like, well, there are much more workers than there are than there are capitalists running everything. So eventually the people will rise up and they'll be class.

war and don't exploit the workers and the workers will rule the world and soon there will only be workers setting aside whether the workers will be able to reproduce but yeah but in there is all of the seeds of every story of Better than human uprising. And it always results in the better than humans killing almost all the humans. I was kind of thinking of Alquist as the equivalent of the, well, spoilers for the end of the movie girl with all the gifts. Have you seen that one? No.

Well, I guess I'll I think you should watch it. I don't want to spoil it for you, but it's a zombie movie. But the zombies are in some ways.

in the very least sort of survival of the fittest things in a lot of zombie apocalypse type things the idea is that well In terms of fitness for continuing to survive and and and reproduce, zombies have the edge on humans, because if they bite you, you turn into a zombie and that spreads pretty quickly and you end up with very few humans and a lot of zombies.

Well, I think we've we've run down here. Any last thoughts about this play before we go? Had you read this before? I had, yes. When?

I don't remember when. Not that long ago, actually. I remember only being made aware of it a few years ago, so I read it then. And did your... most recent reading of it change your view of it like do you remember what you thought of it back then and now what you thought of it reading it now i mean i i i did a closer read of it this time i think the first time i read it i was not um

It didn't impress me that much. You know, it was more of a curiosity that this was the play that gave us the word robot. But this time reading it through, I have a lot more respect for it, I guess because I was able to imagine the staging of it this time. And I thought about that and I thought, yeah, that'd be a pretty funny play to put on.

Yeah, I reading this for the first time, it's very it's very difficult to read things that are very old because a lot of things in them seem old because the things that follow them built on them. Um,

And again, I don't even know enough about the history of this type of genre type fiction to know if this was the first one that did all these things. But it's all in there. And it was it was definitely wackier than I thought it would. I know it was supposed to be a humorous type play, but I guess seeing it translated. into English and done in a way where the humor and farce lands at least half the time was interesting. But I did enjoy the sci-fi parts of it. I did enjoy the punctuated...

sci-fi trope things that they would just move on from real fast. Like that's most of my highlights. I'm looking at another one. It was a Doman. Saying it was not an evil dream to shatter the servitude of labor and the dreadful humiliating labor the man must undergo. I already read that one. Where's the where's the one about?

Oh, here it is. I wanted to turn the whole of mankind into an aristocracy of the world, an aristocracy nourished by millards of mechanical slaves. I think millards is just saying a lot of them. Like the idea is that. With technology, everyone will be a billionaire. Everyone will have servants. Everyone like that. You know, the labor will be gone. Someone will be doing it for us. But like in these the sci fi angle on this is not that there will be an upper class of people who.

enjoy the good life and a lower class that serves them. The idea is everyone gets to be upper class because the lower class aren't even people, they're machines. And that is such a repeated theme.

in sci-fi they just do it over and over and over again it pretty much always ends the same way and this one has an interesting angle it also combines the well with the machines that you make to serve you they're actually not machines if they're able to serve you they're basically people and so now you're really enslaving people it isn't that terrible and this is put in a time where the point of the thing is

Everyone seems to be OK with enslaving labor. And so by us putting it in the story, it's like, yeah, no, it seems right. You know, like just there's the underclass that serves the upper class. And now all the humans will get to be the upper class. I enjoyed those little tidbits, but. This play touches on them, has someone say it, and then continues on with its plot that just lurches towards disaster.

where, you know, the boats stop coming and everyone on the planet is dead and the robots surround them and people get electrocuted. And there's not too much gore in action because I guess maybe it would be difficult to set that into play, but I did.

I did enjoy those little bits on our way to the end of humanity. Thanks again to guest host John Siracusa. If you have an idea for a book, story, poem, or any other reading to cover on a future episode, or if you just like to say hi, you can write me at sophomore.literature at gmail.com. You can also keep up with me at my blog at johnmccoy.org, where I discuss this podcast, literature, pop culture, anything else that comes to mind.

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