Headlong's take on Karel Čapek's 1920 tale of romance and robots is rife with timely debates about tech's threat but at times the philosophical discussions drag on I f our world is currently thinking through the brave new future of generative AI and super intelligence, Karel Čapek's 1920 play RUR: Rossum's Universal Robots proves the notion of robot consciousness and rebellion is not a new anxiety. So does Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which Čapek's drama resembles in its philosophical debates and moral warnings, despite its futurism. Ella Road adapts Čapek's play for our times in this Headlong and Schwarzman Centre co-production, its science apparently informed by research from Oxford University academics, which gives it a cutting-edge, real-world underpinning. The stage is presented as the operations office for the company, also named RUR, which is creating humanoids by mixing human flesh and blood with code and data at its headquarters on an island (a lovely, lush foliage and scaffold design by Loren Elstein). Dom (Trevor Fox) is the company's boss - a "dom" in more ways than one as he is having a Secretary-style, S&M romance with his robot personal assistant, Sulla (Tiffany Gray).

Sitting in Lincoln Center awaiting the curtain for Ayad Akhtar's McNeal--a much anticipated theater production starring Robert Downey Jr., with ChatGPT in a supporting role--I mused how playwrights have been dealing with the implications of AI for over a century. In 1920--well before Alan Turing devised his famous test and decades before the 1956 summer Dartmouth conference that gave artificial intelligence its name--a Czech playwright named Karel Čapek wrote R.U.R.--Rossum's Universal Robots. Not only was this the first time the word "robot" was employed, but Čapek may qualify as the first AI doomer, since his play dramatized an android uprising that slaughtered all of humanity, save for a single soul. Also on the boards in New York City this winter was a small black-box production called Doomers, a thinly veiled dramatization of the weekend where OpenAI's nonprofit board gave Sam Altman the boot, only to see him return after an employee rebellion. Neither of these productions have the pizzazz of a splashy Broadway extravaganza--maybe later we'll buy tickets to a musical where Altman and Elon Musk have a dance-off--but both grapple with issues that reverberate in Silicon Valley conference rooms, Congressional hearings, and late-night drinking sessions at the annual NeurIPS conference.

Ladies and gentleman,

Robotics remained at the leading edge of technology development in 2021, yet it was one hundred years earlier in 1921 that the word robot (in its modern sense) made its public debut. Czech author Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) imagined a world in which humanoids called'roboti' were created in a factory. Karel's brother, the artist and writer Josef Čapek had first coined the term robot before Karel adopted it for this theatrical vision. The Slavic root of the word is even older and even its first known appearance in English dates back nearly two hundred years. During the time of the Habsburgs and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, robot referred to a form of forced labour similar to slavery. In Čapek's play, the roboti were being manufactured as serfs to serve human needs.

Within two years it had been translated into 30 languages, including English, to which it introduced the word "robot." In a century-long dialogue between inventors of fictional and actual robots, engineers have for the most part been forced to play catch-up, either realizing or subverting the vision of robots first expounded in books, movies and television. Now, the reality of robots is in some areas running ahead of fiction, even ahead of what those who study robots for a living are able to keep track of. Heather Knight is an engineer, "social roboticist" and one of 13 core faculty in Oregon State University's robotics program. One day in late October, she was shocked to find the campus crawling with a fleet of autonomous, six-wheeled vehicles made by Starship Robotics.

"Listen Josef," said the Czech playwright Karel Čapek to his brother. "I have an idea for a play." Josef, an artist of some renown, was painting furiously and unimpressed by his brother's intrusion. "What kind of play?" he asked, sharply. Karel set out the plot.

Not many plays introduce a new word to the language. One that did was Karel Čapek's RUR: Rossum's Universal Robots that had its premiere in Prague 100 years ago this month. Every time we use the word "robot" to denote a humanoid machine, it derives from Čapek's play, which coined the term from the Czech "robota" meaning forced labour. But a play that was hugely popular in its time – its Broadway premiere in 1922 had a cast that included Spencer Tracy and Pat O'Brien as robots – has now fallen into neglect. Given our fascination with artificial intelligence, it's high time we gave it another look.

The future of collaboration may look something like … Twitter's Magical Realism Bot. Created by sibling team Ali and Chris Rodley, it randomly recombines words and phrases from an ever-growing database of inputs. The results are absurdist, weird, whimsical: "An old woman knocks at your door. You answer it, and she hands you a constellation." "Every day, a software developer starts to look more and more like Cleopatra."

The appeal of thinking machines, particularly those that seem human, is understandable. If we could create an intelligent being, it might relieve our loneliness, protect us from our enemies, cure our illnesses, comfort our griefs. Then again, it might just as easily turn on us, destroy us, and take over the world. Books, movies and other cultural representations of AI are shot through with this tension: Will the being we create be our savior or our crucifier? But the actual title was, "Frankenstein, or…" Or what?

Nearly 100 years ago, the word "robot" was invented by the Czechoslovak brothers Karel and Josef Čapek. The word appeared for the first time in Karel's theatre play titled R.U.R. in 1920. The play is about humanoid robots who seem happy to work for humans at first, but later a robot rebellion leads to the extinction of the human race. The play achieved a fast international success when it was performed not only in Prague but also in London, New York or Chicago. Karel Čapek was one of the first people who thought of a potential threat if machine-robot inventions happen too fast or without a regulation.