R.U.R and things that have come up before.

Firstly, i would like to apologise to everyone for the lateness of my blog, unfortunately i have been ill but i hope that this will make up for it.

The great thing about Rossum’s Universal Robots was that seemed to portray a lot of the issues and ideas that we had discussed in the light of previous reading, in this way i felt that it really helped to consolidate a lot of the work we have done throughout the term.

To begin with,  i would like to discuss the concept of perfection. As we have spoken about in pervious lectures and in many of our blogs, humanity sees itself as the highest being on the planet. We consider ourselves to be superior to animals, plants and machines, all of which are to differing extents alive due to outr emotional, intellectual and creative drives. The problem with this, a problem which R.U.R picks up on very well, is that human beings are not deities, we are not perfect. Thus there is a constant struggle to create perfection. In R.U.R we see that humanity is not the ideal worker, humans need to sleep, eat and have regular breaks, all of which mean that they can not work continually, their human frailties slow down production. Robot workers are therefore created as a more efficient alternative, they are better than us at working and within the play replace us in that sphere. This seemingly ‘out there’ concept is in fact the mirror of real life. The loom, for example, and the printing press all replaced human workforces and did the job much more efficiently. Industrialisation was simply the replacing of human workers with machines that did the same function but better. Humanity, consequently, in its imperfection had to aim to re-establish itself as the ideal by trying to bring itself closer to the perfect mechanised system e.g. construction lines in a factory, in which each human carries out one repetitive task to create something and then passes it on rather than creating the whole to increase efficiency.

Form and the illusion of humanity is another big issue raised by R.U.R. The robots are built like humans but without all the unnecessary bits, such as emotion. They have a heart, bones and skin amongst other things and, despite the fact that they are made our of a different material to human tissue, they are initially mistaken by Helena for humans. The question here again is, if something appears human, who can deny it humanity? At the end, the robotess Helena and robot Primus go out to repopulate the world because they are in love, here, though they are robots, they are so alike humanity that they have, in essence, become human. This stimulates something that we have discussed in class previously, the fear of replacement. Thinking about it now, i have come to realise that it is not really our fear of being replaced that incites our hatred of things like robots or cloning, rather it is the fear that our replacement will be better than us. It is a fear that we will become obsolete, useless to the world or, even worse, that we are inferior to the replica of ourselves. To be lower in the pecking order when we are so used to considering ourselves as on the top of the pile would diminish us to nothing in our minds. Our egos cannot even contemplate this possibility, even now, writing this, knowing that women were at one point considered an inferior subspecies of the male, I, myself, cannot accept this possibility.

The last thing that i would like to discuss is the uncanny. I would definitely argue that the robots in R.U.R are uncanny. Firstly, they have the form but not the emotions of humanity, thus they have no conscious, which is unsettling to people brought up in the human world, where morals are emphasised from an early age. Secondly, during the revolt, two points are made about the robots which surround them with an eerie aura.

‘They’re standing like a wall around the garden railing. Why are they so quiet? It’s ghastly to be besieged by silence.’

Here the character Dr.Gall is pointing our the uncanniness of the robots. even where a large group of humans vocally silent, they would still make some level of noise. Human’s need to fidget, even simply shifting the weight from one leg to another when standing is required to provide the muscles with some relief. A machine, however, does not tire and it does not therefore need to fidget. The true stillness of something that looked like a mass of humans in a complete prolonged silence would therefore be distinctly unnerving as the familiar becomes strange.

Gall also says;

‘We made the robot faces too much alike. A hundred thousand faces, all alike, turned in this direction. A hundred thousand expressionless bubbles. It’s like a nightmare.’

Here is the 3rd point of uncanniness, the idea we discussed in the last class of the Doppelganger. As humans, we like to think ourselves as unique and, as our appearance plays such a large role in our own perception of ourselves, the idea that we could meet someone who looks like us (a Doppelganger) is unnerving. Therefore the final uncanny impression of the robots in R.U.R is provided by the fact they the robots look so alike, and at the same time look so human, thus the implication is, that all of humanity is alike and that individuals are not ‘special’.

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