ROBOTGrand Machina

R.U.R.: The Play That Named Our Future

On January 25, 1921, Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) premiered at the National Theatre in Prague. The story followed artificial workers—manufactured biological beings designed to perform labor—who eventually rebel against their human masters.

Crucially, Čapek's robots were not the metal machines we imagine today. They were assembled biological beings, closer to what we might now call replicants or androids. The word's first use contained both the promise of artificial labor AND the fear of rebellion.

Metropolis: The Visual Template

Six years after R.U.R., Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) gave robots their cinematic form. The Maschinenmensch—Machine-Human—established the visual language that would define robots for a century: metallic, feminine, simultaneously beautiful and dangerous. Lang's robot was forged in expressionist shadows, a chrome goddess that would echo through every science fiction film to follow.

The Laws That Bound Imagination

In 1942, Asimov introduced the Three Laws of Robotics in his short story “Runaround.” These weren't just plot devices—they were a counter-narrative to the “Frankenstein complex,” the assumption that artificial beings would inevitably turn on their creators.

Asimov also coined the word “robotics” itself—the first use appears in his 1941 story “Liar!” He thought the word already existed. It didn't. He invented both the ethics and the science of a field that barely existed.

The Father of Practical Robotics

Joseph Engelberger took robots from science fiction to the factory floor. His Unimate didn't look like Metropolis's chrome goddess—it was an arm, a tool, a worker. It didn't need to look human because it wasn't meant to be human. It was meant to do the dangerous, repetitive, soul-crushing work that humans shouldn't have to do.

The Valley We've Never Escaped

In 1970, roboticist Masahiro Mori proposed the “uncanny valley”—the hypothesis that our affinity for robots increases as they become more human-like, until a threshold where they become eerily almost-human, triggering revulsion. Only when robots become indistinguishable from humans does affinity return. We've been designing around this valley ever since.

The Terminator: Fear in Chrome

James Cameron's 1984 film gave our fears a face—or rather, a skull. The T-800 endoskeleton, with its red eyes glowing in the dark, became the definitive image of robot-as-threat. The machine that couldn't be reasoned with, couldn't be bargained with, that absolutely would not stop. Ever.

But even as Terminator dominated nightmares, another robot was being born in Japanese labs. Sony's AIBO (1999) was a robot dog—cute, playful, explicitly not threatening. The same decade gave us both the apocalypse and the pet.

Function Over Form

Rodney Brooks understood something crucial: the Roomba succeeded because it didn't try to be human. It was a tool that happened to be autonomous. You didn't anthropomorphize it... except that people did. They named their Roombas. They felt sad when their Roombas got stuck. They filmed their cats riding on Roombas.

Meanwhile, on Mars, Spirit and Opportunity became robotic heroes. When Opportunity finally stopped transmitting in 2018, after 15 years, people genuinely mourned. We had formed relationships with machines 140 million miles away.

The Intimacy Question

In 2007, researcher David Levy predicted that humans would marry robots by 2050. His book Love and Sex with Robots was controversial then—it's becoming less so now. Companion robots exist. Sex robots exist. The ethical frameworks are still catching up.

Kate Devlin, author of Turned On, argues that the question isn't whether people will form intimate relationships with robots—they already are—but how we design these relationships ethically. What does consent mean when one party is artificial? What happens when lonely people prefer synthetic companions to human ones?

The Humanoid Race

Boston Dynamics' Atlas does backflips. Figure's humanoid robots are being tested in warehouses. Tesla's Optimus promises a robot in every home. After decades of avoiding the uncanny valley by making robots obviously robotic, we're now racing to cross it entirely. The question Ishiguro keeps asking—“What does it mean to be human?”—is becoming urgent.