May Day Books Blog: The Chat Bots Are Coming!

“R.U.R.” & “The Insect Play”by the Brothers Ĉapek, 1920

R.U.R.

R.U.R. stands for Rossum's Universal Robots. This is a rare tragicomic play on the development of robots to replace workers and soldiers – in fact all of humanity. There are so many themes here that have filtered into modern science fiction that it seems a seminal work. Humans have stopped having babies – cue Children of Men or Handmaid's Tale. The robots are replacing humans and soldiers, killing hundreds of thousands in massacres – cue Terminator, iRobot or The Matrix. A humanist group is attempting to give rights to the robots – cue Blade Runner / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep or Ex Machina. There is even a touch of 'last man on earth' – cue I Am Legend or Waterworld.

The Robots Rule

There are two speeches that parallel the Marxist view of automation. If machines do more work, humans will be freer to develop all their cultural and social skills, and live without poverty. In this play however, which takes place under capital, the result is mass unemployment and poverty. The shareholders only want dividends and the businessmen only want more robots. The play also reflects Engels' point that humans are a laboring animal. Humans work more than any other animal. Take all work away and humans would be bereft. Sitting on a beach with a Mai Tai is not the be-all and end-all of human life.

The play has an anti-human robot revolution, which might be a metaphor for something else. This is because the engineers made the mistake of giving a hundred of the robots a soul on the advice of a kind-hearted woman. The engineers running RUR hope they can control the revolution because they hold the secret to their construction. Then RUR will also manufacture 'national' robots, not 'universal' ones, that will hate each other, speak different languages and make war, which will help the humans split the robot forces. This shows the writers were against nationalism. There is no hope against the robots, who are efficient at almost everything they do, including killing their creators. Cue Frankenstein, et al. But … they cannot create themselves.

P.S. - I asked the Chat (Ro)Bot AI program ChatGPT to write a review of this play. It did it in about 20 seconds, 5 paragraphs long, giving an accurate, generic take, but NOT from Wikipedia. It reminded me that this play first popularized the term "robot."

The Insect Play

Is this a riff off of fellow Czech Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, written earlier in 1915 about a human being turned into a beetle or a cockroach? Not quite. This play features a parade of butterflies, beetles, flies, chrysalises, larva, crickets, parasites, ants, moths and snails. There is a narrator as in Our Town, but this narrator is a drunken tramp sitting in the woods rhyming his words. The butterflies are having romances and poetry. The chrysalis is a mystic moth. The married dung beetles are counting their muddy nest egg, their 'pile,' their savings, their capital, only to have it stolen by another beetle. The flies are a killer father and his sluggish, gluttonous daughter. The crickets are moving into a new house. The ants are making war on other ants for the control of a tiny patch of dirt. The snails clean up the mess.

The Ants Battle

The insects are really various human types, much like the later Animal Farm. The parasite is a worker bullied by the killer fly. The fly calls him a 'bolshie.' Of most consequence is the exterminating battle between the Ant Realm and the Government of the Yellow Ants. The newspaper ant and the philanthropist ant support the war. Massive amounts of ants die observed by the Tramp, who stomps on the winning dictator ant at the end.

Both these modernist plays were popular and performed in England. The Ĉapek brothers opposed oppressive and fascistic governments and are still celebrated in Prague, as their house has become a museum. It seems they were influenced by revolutionary movements in the early 1900s. One died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, the other in 1938 in Czechoslovakia during the rise of the Nazis.

P.S. - ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence bot, was just asked a question about humans. It said they were 'the worst thing to happen to the planet.' Welcome Skynet!

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year “Pearls Before Swine archive” using these terms: “The Cradle Will Rock” (Blitzstein); “Oil! & the Jungle” (Sinclair); “Love and Information,” “Ideation,” “Things of Dry Hours,” “Appomattox,” “Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again,” “Marie and Rosetta,” “The Good Person of Setzuan” and “Puntilla and His Hired Man, Matti” (both by Brecht);“The Visit” (Durrenmatt); “The Lower Depths” (Gogol); “A Bright Room Called Day” (Kushner); “Love and Information,” “The Convert,” “The Plough and the Stars,” “Shadow of a Gun Man” and “Juno and the Paycock” (all 3 by O'Casey), “Marie & Rosetta,” “Rock and Roll” (Stoppard) or "The Matrix," "Blade Runner," "Children of Men," "Handmaid's Tale."