Reading Alex Kingsley’s excellent essay “Who Gave This Robot a Gun?” via Interstellar Flight Magazine via Medium. The subtitle says it all – “On binaries and personhood in Rossum’s Universal Robots and The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells”.
This essay caught my eye because I struggled to understand Czech author Karel Čapek’s 1920 play Russum’s Universal Robots (RUR), which inspired the name of Peter Brown’s endearing wild robot Roz (ROZZUM unit 7134). I also started reading The Murderbot Diaries last year after attending the 62nd Australian National Science Fiction Convention (NatCon) in Melbourne.
The first thing that caught my eye is Kingsley’s analysis that, in RUR: “The robots want to work not for their masters but for themselves. Humans, however, feel they have been robbed of their opportunity to work, and ‘working men in America revolted against the Robots and smashed them up’… [The character Alquist] articulates that one of the reasons he regrets the creation of the robots is because there is ‘virtue in toil and weariness’, and when he prays, the first thing he thanks God for is his work.”
Then, when the robot uprising begins, “[the character Domin’s] proposed solution resembles the Tower of Babel: to create National Robots with different languages so that the robots cannot communicate and so they begin to resent each other instead of mankind”. I love how God in the Book of Genesis observes “humanity’s ambition and the potential power of their unified language” before deciding to confuse them by creating diverse languages – as explained by Google’s Gemini AI Overview. So, without this divine intervention, we translators would have lost our jobs!
(Image credit: “Rad Robots”, The Guardian, August 5, 2009, featuring the book Rad Robots: A Celebration of Awesome Automations: the Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know by Simon Furman.)
(Day 62 #WarmWinterRead #WWR25 via @librarieschangelives)
Voices under the Sun 陽光下的聲音 