“Ladies and gentleman,” said the unlikely host, spitting blue sparks as he rose to his feet before a stunned audience. “Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, it gives me great pleasure,” he continued, electric eyes flashing, shiny arms slowly rising.
The year was 1928. The venue–the Royal Horticultural Hall in London where the Model Engineering Exhibition was getting underway. Eric the Robot, who loosely resembled a 6-foot tall version of L. Frank Baum’s Tinman from the Wizard of Oz—Baum’s book was first published in 1900, but the blockbuster movie would not be released until 1939—presided over the exhibition’s opening ceremony, kicking it off with a four-minute speech. Popular Science editor, Robert E. Martin, spared no details covering Eric’s debut for the December 1928 issue: “With a grinding, creaking noise, the figure rose and moved his stiff arms in a superfluous gesture asking for silence. Suddenly, the black dead eyes became alive with a ghastly light.”
Emblazoned on Eric’s metal breastplate in black letters was the acronym, “RUR,” no doubt a tribute to the Czech playwright, Karel Čapek, who coined the “robot” from the Czech word robota, which translates to “forced labor.” In Čapek’s 1920 play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), a factory manufactures human-like robots to work for humans. In time, the robots rebel against their human overlords and wipe them out. Eventually, with no way to reproduce or manufacture themselves, the robots die out, too. It was Čapek’s dark, cynical tone of exploitation for the purposes of cheap, grueling labor that hung over robots’ debut more than a century ago.
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The year before Eric’s London performance, a female robot, Maria, starred in the silent movie, Metropolis, a German science-fiction film set in a futuristic utopian society. In the movie, a privileged class lives in a beautiful world made possible by a hidden, underground working class of robots and humans that keeps the city running. Maria sparks a revolt that unravels the utopian society’s dark secret.
Fast forward to Isaac Asimov’s 1942 short story, “Runaround,” in which Asimov first stipulated his three laws of robotics—a form of law governing slavery for robots: a robot must never harm a human or let a human come to harm; must always obey humans unless it violates the first law; and must protect its own existence unless it violates the first or second laws. Not surprisingly, “Runaround” inspired the 2004 movie I, Robot in which servile robots rebel against humans.
In 1957, Mechanix Illustrated may have taken the idea of robot exploitation to an extreme in “You’ll Own ‘Slaves’ By 1965.” The story describes how in the future humans will be waited on by domestic robots like Jingles (a butler) and Steela (a cook). Not only did the story miss the mark by more than half a century (we’re still waiting on domestic service robots), but it reinforced the social abomination of slavery.
When WWI veteran William Richards and engineer Alan Reffell, Eric the Robot’s inventors, emblazoned RUR on Eric’s breastplate, was it more than a lighthearted tribute to Čapek’s play? Although Eric’s abilities were limited to short-lived performances that included standing and bowing before a crowd, shooting sparks from his mouth, and fielding a few questions with banal responses (in January 1929, Eric wowed a New York City audience with his uncanny abilities), he undoubtedly tapped tensions rooted not only in the age-old cycle of human exploitation but also rising fears of automation. In fact, in his Popular Science story, Martin reassures his readers that “Eric’s life-giving levers are set in motion by a man pushing buttons.” In other words, “the robot cannot work without human direction and control.” Quoting an official from New York Edison Company, Martin wrote, “the mechanical man and his ultimate universal practical application will rid humanity of much drudgery and thousands of congenial tasks.” Eric the Robot was not an emissary of humanity’s doom, was their message, but a harbinger of better times ahead.
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It has been nearly a century since Eric the Robot debuted in London. In the interim, his internal mechanisms—his copper veins, geared joints, pullied limbs, and incandescent eyes—were ransacked to build another robot, George. But in 2016, Eric was refurbished for a 2017 robotics show at the Science Museum in London, his shiny RUR breastplate buffed and polished.
During the course of Eric’s long absence, robots have taken many forms, from giant mechanical arms that make cars to intricate surgical fingers that perform sensitive operations to pancake-shaped vacuums that rove around our homes unattended. We even have cute robot pets, like Qoobo, and friendly service bots like Pepper and Eve. But we haven’t yet mastered the intricacies of humanoid robots. When we do, will we subconsciously (or consciously) draw from our biases and fears—articulated in Čapek’s play—and build robots like Tesla’s Optimus, with blank faces, undersized heads, and oversized limbs that must be manipulated by humans to perform to our satisfaction? Or will we break from a century of ominous designs and strive for something less servile and more companion-like that reflects a brighter, friendlier future between man and machine?
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