The First Robot

A year later, on a product market, you will find your next step or your first big enterprise.

“With KaE, the development of the online market, the advantages of the companies are also the advantages of security.”

And that is, before you go to the question. The topic of security and compliance is really simple. It is often too long, but it is often too long. That is, there are many startups, questions, and answers. And if it is not, it is still not in the beginning.

Yet, Staten Alfantapuntkom. The History Channel Original Podcast. History this week, March 29th, 1923.

I'm Alana Casanova Burgess.

The Glitzi-Curphorced Adom Theatre is packed with well-dressed Berliners. The Theatre is new, and so is the play. Well, it is new to this German audience, at least. It has been lighting up stages across Europe and the US for two years now. The lights go down, and the curtains open on two actors in a familiar scene.

A boss and his secretary at the office.

“The executive who is powerful and important enough to have a private secretary, you know,”

means back in his chair and says take a letter, and dictates something that provides all the exposition that the audience needs to get things going. This is Sitten Hill Professor Dennis Jers, who has been teaching this play in his English and media classes for years. He says this would have been a familiar trope, an office comedy.

But this version comes with a twist. The boss, Harry, rattles off a long letter, getting the audience up to speed. But while Harry is going on and on, the secretary, Silla, is acting a little off. She's sitting at a typewriter, still and placid and immobile, simply listening to the boss's words.

The audience wonders, why isn't she typing?

“She's missing all his dictation, is something wrong with Silla?”

Harry finishes his entire letter. And then, in seconds, she federally types out the entire letter. Pulls out the paper and says finished, next letter. The letter is perfect, no typos, no words missed, in just a few seconds, because, despite her very human appearance, Silla and many characters will meet like her, are not human.

The play is called, Verstance Universal Robots. In this version, they've translated the title character's name from the original Czech name, Rossum's Universal Robots, are you are for short. The title character's name doesn't really matter, but another word in the title is very important.

When I was researching technology in American drama, all the scholarship that I looked at had a little footnote about this odd little play called R-U-R.

The footnote always said, "This is the source of the word robot.

The word robot was invented for this play." The German version premiering tonight in this Berlin theater is groundbreaking in many ways. The avant-garde set design is the breakout work of a major 20th century architect. The production incorporates film projection in ways that no play has ever done before, but are U-R's enduring legacy, and the thing that captivates audiences around the world is this

new word that's never been used before. Robot. An animatronic humanoid with its own autonomy, capable of independent thought, action, and, as our on-stage boss Harry will unfortunately find out, Violent Rebellion. Today, Robot Fever takes the world by storm and creates a new vision for the future.

How did R-U-R help set down rules that still guide the tech industry today, and has the invention turned on its creator? The author of R-U-R, the playwright Carol Chopic, was born in 1890 and grew up in the mountains of Bohemia, in the modern-day Czech Republic. Early on, he was exposed to the mechanics of the human body.

Chopic's father was a doctor. He would go around the countryside, making house calls, and young Carl would follow along

caring for people in that situation.

“His mother was more humanist, she was into folklore, told him, "Ferry Tails."”

By the time he's 24, Chopic is a young writer emerging onto the Czech literary scene. He works with his writing partner and brother, Joseph, and you can really see those early

fairy tale influences and the works that first make them famous.

Illustrated stories about puppies and kittens that were kind of as popular in his day and his country as, you know, pattington, the barren, England, or Mickey Mouse in America. Not the sort of author that you'd expect to write about a dystopian robot rebellion, but according to Professor Jers, there were science. The puppy characters and the cat characters were playful and also bitingly satirical characters

that mocked the human tendency to follow rules and do bureaucracy. bureaucracy might seem like a bizarre subject for a children's book, but Chopic and Czech

“society as a whole were really steeped in the idea that industrialization and the bureaucracy”

that came with it was at best new and weird, and at worst, a violent threat. See Czech regions had abolished surfdom in the mid-1800s, in just one generation, much of the Czech working class went from toiling in the fields, to working in factories and offices. Working class people were happy to leave the feudal system behind, but this new style of work

was an adjustment, it felt deeply removed from the natural world, soulless even. Then in 1914, World War I hits, Chopic himself doesn't fight, he has a medical exemption, but all of Europe witnesses the horrors of this new mechanized style of warfare. All of this surfdom and labor exploitation, the awkward transition to industrialized work, the carnage of mechanized warfare, it's all swirling around the Czech sight-guysed in 1920.

When Chopic and his brother start working on a new sci-fi play, Rossin's Universal Robots.

We always recommend Shopify, it took us from an idea to a real business.

We got set up, I think, in less than a day, with very little effort, we could just focus on the supply chain to the product development. Shopify gives us the ability to customize without the complexity. We can change something without introducing fragility or having to pay a developer. Wear thirsty total, and we leveled up our business with Shopify.

Start your free trial at Shopify.com/aU. Understanding Power requires more than headlines. I'm Peter Hamby, host of The Powers That Be, a podcast from Park Examining Politics, Economics, and Media to provide context analysis and clarity without sensationalism. We ask how power operates, who benefits, and what's at stake.

“If you want to move beyond breaking news to deeper understanding, join us on the Powers That”

Be. New episodes every weekday follow the powers that be wherever you get your podcasts. Our UR is set in a factory on a private island, where reclusive inventor, Rossin, has figured out how to fabricate synthetic humans. These inventions are called robots, a word that Chopic's brother makes up.

But it has a pretty powerful origin.

The word robotnik meant the surf that owed forced labor to their master. And would have been a term that cut deep into the psyche of a community that only a generation or two ago had been totally controlled by this system of surfdom. Harry, the human executive we meet in the first scene, is the plant manager. These robots are being factory-produced on assembly lines, and shipped around the world

for menial labor. What professor jurors calls the three D's. The dirty dangers and dull labor of robots, it's a very strong sales pitch. Humans will be free of the labor of the free of drudgery. But these robots are not the tin man machines that were used to imagining.

They're lab-grown flesh, not metal.

where nerves are spun.

“These were factory-built humans from a chemical substitute for living protoclasm.”

These characters were biological, that is not buckets of bolts.

These synthetic beings are largely indistinguishable from real humans. They can perform independent tasks. They can reach logical conclusions. But importantly, Harry tells us they do not have souls. They can't feel pain.

The perfect worker. Like Sella, Harry's robot secretary, who is interrupted from her rapid letter writing by Helena Glory, a young woman who barges into Harry's office. He's the daughter of the factory president and an avid robot writes advocate. She confronts Harry about the robot's treatment.

“How does he know that they don't have souls?”

They deserve more respect. But even Helena, the activist, can't see the robots as full people. She describes how her town council has bought some robots as street sweepers and she corrects herself. She tries to say, "Oh no, they were hired."

She slips. She says, "What?" the dehumanizing term. Helena doesn't have much success in her campaign.

The company does ultimately give the robots pain sensors so they can protect themselves from

harm. But that's more about safeguarding company assets than anything else. Then the play flashes forward 10 years. We're in a dystopian reality. Robots have completely supplanted actual humans in all kinds of jobs.

Without work, the humans feel they have no real purpose and have stopped reproducing. Universities circulate petitions to restrict robot production, but they're quickly overruled by RUR shareholders. Robots aren't just convenient anymore. They're necessary, especially because RUR has started producing robot soldiers.

Events are clamoring for more mechanized soldiers to fight in their human wars.

“And one of the kind of brilliant, if you want to call it brilliant, kind of twisted ways”

that they can continue to make robots marketable is that they want to market robots that have different racial and facial and cultural identities and that speak different languages so that these robots will continue to fight each other the way humans do. Robots are either working until they fall apart or they're on killing fields. And the models that can now feel pain start to experience a malfunction that the creators

call the robot cramp, which actually just means the robot rebellion. The robot who throws down his tools and says I don't want to work, there's a robot called Radius who, hell another human learns, has had the robot cramp and is going to be destroyed. This is the robot that hell in a place in the library. Radius the robot has been educating himself by reading human books.

Radius the robot arrives at the conclusion that humanity is no longer necessary. In fact, it's a parasite on the robot race who are doing all the work. He says you are not as strong as the robots, you're not as skillful as the robots. The robots can do everything, you only give orders, you do nothing but talk. Radius manages to escape destruction and leads a violent revolt that ends in the extinction

of the human race. In the final scene, the last surviving human, a working-class builder, talks to two of the robots, a male and a female. He calls them Adam and Eve and tells them to go on to do what they will with the world. The robots leave arm and arm.

The curtain closes. Are you are is a hit with audiences?

They've never seen anything like this.

The robot rebellion seems like a tired science fiction trope. But to the audiences who watched Chapex play for the first time, this was brand new stuff. But the play gets middleing reviews from critics. One says it goes on for three acts too jocally, too pointedly, too drawn out, and yet quite

Carol Chapex has a good idea, then the gods abandon him.

“Word of the robot play quickly makes its way to the US, and a little over a year after”

its small check premiere, are you are debuts on Broadway in New York City. This version features some very notable alterations to the plot. The ending is changed. Rather than two robots walking off into the sunset, the play closes on two young people, implicitly human, finding sanctuary from the robot revolution at an abandoned cottage in

the desert. Maybe they thought robot apocalypse was too cynical for a Broadway audience. But perhaps even more importantly, the robots themselves have changed. In this version, the robots still resemble humans, but they are getting a pretty distinctive look.

They have like bowl haircuts they look like, Mr. Spock, but also kind of like, neanderthal humans,

“they're tough, they're tall, they're big, and they're hunched over.”

They have this shuffling gate that physical embodiment of you are looking at a worker. After adaptations follow suit, the robots become even less human. They start wearing metallic clothing, more machine-like. By the end of the decade, RUR's robots are very different from Chopic's original vision. When RUR had a revival in New York, six or seven years later, the robot characters were

given what looks to me like a tin foil hat and flaired boots that look like something out of a flash Gordon series. This shift from synthetic humans to metal machines might seem like a gimmick, but it's a turning point that changes the concept of robots, the arc of science fiction, and the future of tech forever.

Charles Chopic certainly wasn't the first person to come up with the idea of a mechanical

being. Professor John Jordan, author of the MIT Pressbook Robots, told us that the idea of mechanical life has been in the cultural zeitgeist for centuries. One particular favorite was a 1764 mechanical duck that became a global sensation. Because it would ingest pallets and then excrete.

If you think about it now, it's like, that's a really pretty low bar to say we've created life. At the time, though, artificial life was individual, one-off inventions, like an excreting duck, or the mechanical turk, a chess-playing robot that seemingly couldn't be beat. Jefferson wanted to play it, Napoleon wanted to play it, the tech bros of the time wanted

to test themselves against this mechanical entity that was not mechanical at all. Actually, the mechanical turk turned out to be. The grandmaster who was a very small stature inside a box. The robots in RUR were, in some ways, just the latest version of mechanical beings. So why did this one stick?

Well, according to Professor Jordan, some of it had to do with how well the play was received by audiences. It was one of the 20th century's most produced stage plays. So this wasn't some sort of little boutique art, you know, avant-garde theater in the corner of Eastern Europe, it was like worldwide, people said, "This is heading in nerve."

The beginning of the 20th century was a huge turning point in the way humans lived and worked all around the world. A major wave of industrialization brought steel and electricity and assembly lines into the workforce. And World War I's Machines created carnage on an entirely new scale.

And this violence was brought to major European cities, hubs of culture and enlightenment. The world of learning and humanities and arts is now running headlong into this world of steel and battleships and mustard gas. So audiences around the world were primed for a play that critiqued to mechanization,

“but the thing that set the robot apart from any other atomaton that came before it?”

That was not the tin man up there, these were human beings playing robots. So the robots were indistinguishable from flesh and blood.

The world had seen atomatons before, but they were always one-off oddities, clearly

distinguishable from a real human, but the robots of R-U-R are distinctly human-like.

the robots still look like people, and they also mirror humans in scale.

They're an entire race capable of extinguishing all of humanity, and that idea really takes hold. R-U-R is still in its heyday when another major robot story comes onto the scene. Metropolis, one of the last major silent films, comes out of Germany in 1927. It's arguably the single most impactful science fiction film of all time. If you picture a typical sci-fi scene, a rainy futuristic mega city, towering art dego's

skyscrapers, endless lines of workers shuffling around in unison, you're picturing Metropolis. The movie stars Maria, a beautiful female robot who incites a violent revolt. Sound familiar?

“Maria is clearly based on R-U-R's robots, but there's one important distinction.”

She's fully metal. Picture a sexy female C3PO. Maria is in many ways the progenitor of so many other robots. You clearly see George Lucas, you know, borrowing heavily, and you see so many of the common robot tropes that will persist in cinema for the next, you know, century.

The rebellion. The robots rise up. The enforced laborers say enough, and are now turned against the humans. This version of a robot really sticks, a metal being in human form,

“who may or may not, but most likely will, try to kill humans.”

The trope permeates pop culture throughout the 1930s. Robots appear in pulp fiction novels, advertisements, even in an Oswald the lucky rabbit cartoon. Oswald and his girlfriend are having a lot of fun at home, playing the piano, doing magic tricks, juggling eggs, when they're interrupted by a mad scientist. Lots of hijinks and sue, but in the end, Oswald rescues his girlfriend from the scientists

malfunctioning robot, then a helpful goat had butts at two pieces. So, radiuses anti-human revolt in RUR, birthed 1,000 killer robots. They dominate the sci-fi scene for a decade, until another sci-fi giant enters the scene. Isaac Azimoff, one of the most prolific writers in the genre.

“500 books, 3 degrees from Colombia, I think, all of a word in chemistry.”

So, clearly a smart guy, really one of the founding authors of U.S. science fiction.

And, much like Chopic, he starts writing science fiction in the midst of a world war, the second one.

He's seeing the mechanization of war at a whole other level compared to what Chopic did. And, I don't think it's just coincidence that they're both reacting to mechanized warfare of previously unfathomable destruction, culminating in the atomic attacks on Japan. But, unlike Chopic, Azimoff resents this killer robot trope. He even says publicly that he thinks RUR is a terrible play, but he can't totally escape Chopic's influence.

His first hit is a series of pulp fiction short stories called iRobot. Chopic's creation is right there in the title. Except, the robot protagonist is deeply loyal to humans. It's his defining trait, because Robby the Robot is hard-coded to follow three explicitly stated rules. One, a robot may not enter human being, or through an action,

allow a human being to come to harm. Two, a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings,

except to where such orders were conflict with the first law. Three, a robot must protect its own

existence, as long as such perfection does not conflict with even the first or second law. So, basically, first and foremost, a robot can't harm a human. Ever, it must obey orders unless those orders would harm a human. And lastly, it must protect itself, as long as doing so, doesn't break either of the first two rules. Later on, Azimoff adds another broader reaching law. He calls it the zero law.

These rules become known as the three laws of robotics.

“Chapic invented the word robot. Azimoff invented robot ticks, and his laws become foundational”

to robots, and not just in sci-fi. When science catches up to fiction in the late 20th century, Azimoff's laws are still treated as gospel by real human scientists. One of the foremost roboticists in the world who say I am Rodney Brooks in Australia and who worked at MIT. Brooks is the founder of IRobot, a robotics company named after Azimoff's stories. It's the company that gave us the room of vacuum. It also makes bomb squad robots for war zones.

And he has to defend his very proto robots in the '80s against charges that while you didn't

follow Azimoff's law. Since when is a science fiction book a design mandate for an electro-mechanical

“device? Azimoff's laws persist to this day. At the 2024 AI and Robotics Summit in Washington DC,”

director James Cameron delivered a special message. He spoke virtually. Picture Cameron's giant head projected 1984 style above the audience. And in his speech, he addresses the ethical framework for AI and robotics, saying, "We have the answer from the great prophet, Isaac Asimoff, in his three laws of robotics. A robot may not injure a human being or through an action." A Hollywood director telling robotic

experts how to think about their work. It's this mingling of science and fiction. The professor Jordan says is the real story of Chopic Asimoff, robots, and science fiction in general. The idea that robotics and tech, a very real branch of science, sites fiction as a foundational guide, that's pretty unique. It would be like Jules Verne writes about submarines and also talks about, "Oh yeah, they're going to carry nuclear warheads and float around the world undetectably

and that if our enemies launch a nuclear attack will respond from these submarines." So if Jules Verne had come up with mutually stirred destruction from submarine board nuclear warheads, the other example, and I heard this from a tech-bro way back when. It said, "Imagine the advantage frequent flyer program being invented before the airplane." Like, the Wright brothers didn't think of frequent flyer programs. No, for good reasons he did. And yet Asimoff is doing

robots psychology before computers can play tech tech tow before a robot can fold a shirt. Science fiction has led the way on a number of real-life advancements. Communication satellites

were first proposed in the 1940s by Arthur Clark, another sci-fi giant. Clark also wrote a

short story in the 1960s that featured a global network of computers. It helped inspire the internet, and it's still happening today. In 2014, the FDA approved the Luke Arm, a robotic prosthetic arm capable of performing fine motor skills. The name officially stands for "Life Under kinetic Evolution." L-U-K-E, though it's really a nod to Luke Skywalker's metal hand in Star Wars. But this faith in sci-fi that if something exists on paper, it can exist in real life,

has also led to real harm, think fairness, and crypto crashes. I do think that there's a sense that, you know, you can't understand what I see, you can't understand what I'm doing,

“so you need to trust me to do it because I'm capable of doing it.”

Whether you're a believer or a skeptic, one thing is for certain. When Carol Chopic conceived of robots, he was definitely not aiming to inspire the AI era. Based on his belief in the dignity and value of human work, Chopic likely would not approve of our robots, and so over a hundred years later, the invention truly has turned on its creator. History this week is a back pocket studio's production in partnership with the history channel.

To stay updated on all things history this week, sign up at historythisweekpodcast.com and follow us on Instagram at historythisweekpodcast. If you have any thoughts or questions,

Dennis Jers, professor of English and media at Seaton Hill University, and John Jordan, author of

“the MIT Pressbook, Robots, and thanks to Yitka Chakovah, editor of the book RUR and the vision”

of artificial life, she helped us understand the man and science behind RUR. This episode was

produced by Makimi Lynn, sound designed by Ben Dickstein, and hosted by me, Alana Casanova Burgess.

“For Back Pocket Studios, our executive producer is Ben Dickstein. From the history channel,”

our executive producers are Eli Lair and Liv Fiddler. Don't forget to follow, rate, and

review historythis week, wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll see you next week.