Retell Lecture

This is a kind of object that you’re probably all familiar with when you had the term robot, but I’m gonna show you the very, very first robots. These were the very first robots. They were characters in a play in the 1920s called Rossum’s Universal Robots and that, the play was written by Czech writer called Karel Capek. And basically, these robots, you know, people tend to think of robots as kind of cute cuddly toys or, you know, Hollywood depictions kind of devoid of politics. But the first robots were actually created and imagined in a time of absolute political turmoil. You just had the First World War, you know, it finished and had a devastating impact across Europe and so people are kind of reflecting on what does it mean to be human, what makes us human, those kinds of question. And this kind of context is what inspired Capek to write this play. And interestingly, these robots being human, they are actually in the play assembled on a production line, a bit like the Ford manufacturing production line. So even though they are human, they are assembled and these robots are designed to labour, and that is their primary purpose in society.