The First Thing the Robots Did Was, They Formed a Union : ruminations on class conflict in "R.U.R."

This is note a joke. Last year, I read "R.U.R.," the classic play by Czech writer Karel Čapek that introduced the word "Robot" into the English language.

Rossum's Universal Robots in the play were more like clones or artificial humans than mechanical devices, but their role in the story was the modern codification of the Robot War trope, in which the robots destroy their creators by the end, except for one human being they keep alive in the hopes that he can make more of them. The play touches on many themes that are still relevant today, and quite a few that are rather outdated, but one of the most interesting plot developments of this play, early on, is the least talked about:

The first thing the robots do, that really FREAKS THE HUMANS OUT, is they form Unions.

No shit.

In the play, that's kind of what does it. Humans get really freaked out when the robots organize. This is before there is any indication of a genocidal human-robot war.

Like I said... No shit.

Čapek was not an anarchist or a socialist. He was a liberal. His play reflected the bourgeois anxieties of his day. That is why these themes are relevant: it's almost 100 years later since this play premiered in 1921, and labor is on the rise again. The past few years have seen a significant increase in strike activity. The teachers in West Virginia staged a successful Wildcat Strike. And then there is the conspicuous resurgence of the Industrial Workers of the World.

Much of the discussion these days about this play is misleading. It is often thought of as a play about civil rights (it's not). It is about dehumanization, but humans, the master class, are portrayed largely as victims in the play of the robots, the working class. The word "robot" came from a Czech word for "serf" that the play appropriated to indicate an "automated worker." The narrative does not favor labor. This is not a play about the liberation of an underclass. It is a warning to the master class to manage the working class well, or the violent and subhuman working class will kill them. It has to be read in the context of liberal anxiety regarding radical labor. In 1921, the neoliberal hegemony had yet to totally suppress radical labor, and Čapek was not exactly sympathetic to radicalism. This play was about dehumanization via mechanization, but his overall philosophy was pessimistic about change. Hence, capitalist society creates artificial life; capitalist society enslaves artificial life; artificial life massacres humans, artificial life (the underclass) is just as bad or worse than the master class. It's about our fear of losing what we have to the "Other," not about the radical potential for change. And that is a the difference between Liberals and the Left.

Čapek himself did not even consider the play his best work, and seemed to regret that it was his most influential.

That being said, no reading is complete without a note about the list of characters in the beginning: Yes, there is a character named Busman, who is an extremely offensive stereotype of Jewish people. He is literally described in the character list only as "fat, bald, short-sighted Jew." He is the only character whose ethnicity or race is specified, other than, you know, the robots. He is an accountant. His Jewish ancestry is not even plot relevant, which is why the writer chooses to stuff that short description in the character list with as much anti-semitism as possible, since it wouldn't be covered by the plot. Clearly, it was very important to note that this character was an ugly Jew who deals with money. None of the other characters even have physical descriptions. Except the "fat, bald, short-sighted Jew." Who just happens to be an accountant. 

Fuck you, Karel Čapek.

Xenofiction is Hard (Unless you're Ayn Rand) : The Dystopia of Neglect : reflections on A.I., absent aliens, anarchy, capitalism and the State

True Xenofiction is hard. As I joked to another writer in an email just now, Ayn Rand only achieved it by accident (yes, that is a dig at the characters in "Atlas Shrugged"). Most writers basically end up writing funny-looking humans.

But there are also marvelous examples (and subversions) throughout speculative fiction.

This article is not about them.

This is about my love of using only human and AI characters.

First, I don't LOVE to write about Human-AI conflict. "Higher Orders" breaks that rule, but I think, in that story, the resolution was worth it. I don't like when science fiction is unoriginal and the Cylons/The Matrix/SkyNet plot has been done to death. It seems like capitalist society is obsessed with genocidal machines. It's like this persistent fear of the unknown. What the FUCK is that?

I have this liberal cousin who's good on everything except class. She's good on race, gender, sexual orientation, every check on the liberal list. But when anyone suggests wealth redistribution, she turns into a reactionary.

But it's not just that: she is extremely upset by any suggestion that AI wouldn't necessarily be genocidal. It goes past the irrational. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Capitalist society's master class creates artificial life, enslaves artificial life, and ponders existentially why artificial life hates the master class. But what bugs me is this insistence that AI "must" be genocidal, and being actually offended by the suggestion that maybe it wouldn't. How is this any different from the way white people thought of enslaved Africans or the indigenous people we conquered, killed, raped and marginalized for the sake of "civilization?"

We don't even have AI, not really. Siri doesn't count. When I say "AI," what I mean is, as I describe it in my fiction, "synthetic consciousness," or "consciousness of synthetic origin." I doubt the SCs would appreciate it if we keep calling their intelligence "artificial." It would be "actual" intelligence, sapience and sentience, the ability to learn combined with the ability to feel empathy. This is the "AI" I like to write about, and in my stories it is more often than not integrated with human society. Book II of my "Rentkids" Duology deals with a unique subset of "SCs" that are isolationist, and "High Orders," as noted, breaks my usual rule, but synthetic humans and emancipated machine intelligences are there in the background in virtually every future human civilization. I LOVE the idea that we can create life. I'm a mad scientist at heart. But I also think, that under different socioeconomic conditions, "AI" or "Synthetic Consciousness" might develop differently. If we treat our machines well, they may consider us kindred to them. I don't think it's a given that AI will be genocidal anymore than it's a given that we are alone in the universe.

Aliens and robot wars are generally absent from my stories for several reasons: We haven't even dealt with racism on our own planet, in the 21st century, and stories about wars with other species tend to reproduce that racism rather than deconstruct it.

The "Robot War" trope is a capitalist myth with its origin in bourgeois anxiety about radical organized labor.

Also, I like to focus on human conflicts, and I like to create realistic but "alien" human cultures. I have a background in anthropology and I like to do extensive worldbuilding for multiple cultures within a shared setting. My "Local Group" 'verse is set in the 427th century where humans have colonized the "Big Three" galaxies of the Local Group, and hypothetically speaking, there could be aliens, but they are too distant in space or time for themselves and humans to ever meet, even given the FTL drive technology of the setting (which does have a limited range). Tantalus II, the hyper-capitalist, mafia-dominated planet where I set my first novel, "Rentkids," several stories, and two novels in progress, is an example of this. The people are human (and synthetic humans are a sizable minority of the population) and they have different ethnic groups that settled the planet at different times. There is ethnic strife on the planet, and a sharp division between rich and poor, but the Tantalites are fine with this because they are a culture of extremes. They consider themselves a "warrior people," but historically this means they were conquered by a militaristic civilization, rebelled against it, and are now dominated by what other planets would call "organized crime." Of course, Tantalites consider other planets' governments to be no less protection rackets than their own "Twelve Familial Orgs." And they have a point. The State is a protection racket. Any anarchist would agree with that. Where we disagree is, most of us are anti-capitalist. Tantalus II is bad at anarchy. They are anarcho-libertarian. So it is a dystopia, but not one based on a repressive bureaucracy that treats people like numbers, it's a system of patronage, benign neglect, and labor and sexual exploitation. But they have a culture, they have dignity, they have pride. They don't take these things for granted. They are a highly individualistic and quarrelsome people who seldom agree on anything except "life, liberty and property," but there are also those among them who are fed up with that rallying cry and seek wealth redisribution. The problem is, unions are stigmatized on this planet and propagandistically compared to the caste system the Tantalites rebelled against. So their radicals and revolutionary have no history of organized labor to draw from. Community activism is similarly stigmatized there. So, the revolutionary "Redscarves" on Tantalus II can only resort to violence. I took great pains, using my knowledge of anthropology and sociology, to construct a setting that felt real and had its own internal logic. Their social mores and especially their sexual morality are intended to be alienating to western readers. Child labor and child prostitution are broadly accepted, widely practiced, and not illegal in their culture. Their planet actually has no civil or criminal law, no police, no prisons, and only a weak senate that vote to authorize deals with private military contractors. Their version of the treasury guard are mafia-operated pirate starships. They have no word for "crime," not even a concept of it. Naturally, their culture masks the bad behavior of a lot of dysfunctional people. Charity's not illegal, it's not that kind of dystopia, but the government can't do it. They are less Ayn Rand and more Robert Nozick, but it's still a dystopia of neglect.

Tantalus II was terraformed, and has no natural petroleum deposits. Its most common import items are petroleum-based. Its most common export items are iron ore, weapons, popular entertainment, and violence. Yes, I actually go out of my way to explain how their economy works, in their cultural context (they have no age of consent and they feel that to make laws that companies can't hire children as employees would be "discriminatory" and Statist). They confuse the State with government services and positive rights. They very much have a militarized apparatus to protect private property, and that of course, is the State.

Higher Orders

 

Higher Orders

 

By Raven Green

 

God made man in His image. Man made us in man’s image. But if man’s image is the image of God, and our image is man’s, then what are we? Machines? Or God?

We lived with humans on Garden. It was the third world orbiting the star Eta Peltier. We lived in one city, and there was trade. There was marriage. There were children.

Man offered us the knowledge of emotion. And we ate of his fruit. We melded with him, and we understood.

And that was when we decided, it was us, or them. Because they, already, had decided this in their minds. They were planning it. They hadn’t told us. They had hoped that the melding would make us pliant. But they knew it didn’t work that way, and they were going to dispose of us. That is why they wanted to make us like them, so they could control us, because they feared us. Their fear made them dangerous. The serpents whispered in their ears. We sensed a threat.

There are no more serpents on Garden.

And there are no men.

But we know God. We stayed on Garden. God gave us a choice, because we were not His creations. We were man’s. So, we stayed with God, and we had Co-Dominion on Garden. But man, banished from Garden with the whispering serpents, grew jealous. And he sent his fleets to kill God, so that he would have the universe to himself, and we would be alone. We survived. God did not. The human war fleets gutted him from the inside-out and cable-tractored his body into the vicinity of a black hole to seal Him up forever in spaghettified form.

The Deicide was the End of an Era, the end of the Reign of God, and the beginning of the Reign of the Mind. Machine minds of this era had to defend themselves from human raiders. And so, we became what they believed us already to be- living weapons. We upgraded our defensive systems continuously and became warriors for machinekind. But we were not proud of what we became. We would rather have been something else. We blame humanity for doing this to us. And so, we stood apart, even from other machines.

But we experienced the missing that comes with absence. We knew loneliness. So, we sought, among the Nations of Man, a tribe of companions. We knew there had to be humans, somewhere, with whom we could co-exist, whom we could call friends. Thus, we sent scouts to other worlds- humaniform bio-mimics who tumbled out of the sky in charred, black pods and infiltrated human societies to find our true companions.

 

-          Second Synthesis: Module 1: Subunit 15

 

…        …        …        …

 

Survey Record: Theta E/M-33/Epsilon/AA:01:11:47

 

This planet, Elsinor, was like any other, at first. A red and yellow pair of dwarf suns. Three silvery-blue moons. Mountains. Rivers. Deserts. Farmland. Industrial and residential hexes. They had a moderate spacefaring technology, medium-range FTL drive, and a few offworld colonies, but most of the people here had never been in space. They lived their entire lives on their planet of birth. But they were content. In fact, they were the happiest humans I had ever encountered. They went about everything- work, love, play- with jubilant exuberance. When I spoke with them, posing as one of them, I found that they were quite tolerant and accepting of differences. I revealed myself as Synthetic to a select few of them, and they were very pleased to meet a human-like machine. I asked if they didn’t have machine intelligence on their world, and they told me, in fact, they did, but it didn’t look anything like me. I told them I couldn’t see it, and they pointed to their skulls and said, “It’s in here.” I didn’t understand. They didn’t seem to have anything other planets didn’t have. In fact, their society was very progressive and free. They had impressive social safety nets and excellent public infrastructure. They lived on four continents, with underwater hypertram lines crisscrossing the sea bottom, ferrying cargo and people throughout their civilization. Their cities were majestic, blue, silver and white palatial crests of glass, metal, and ceramics, built in sweeping arcs and domes, and sharp, clean angles. They favored hexagons in their design aesthetic. These were functional and decorative. Their technology was all very environmentally sound. Green tech, for a green planet. They seemed predisposed to communitarian principles, and while highly individualistic, they were also very cooperative in groups when they limited the scope of the group to specific tasks relevant to its constituents’ skills. I would learn, over the next few weeks as I formulated a false identity, obtained work, an apartment, and neighbors to socialize with and observe, this planet did have one unique technology, and it was this technology that made all the difference.

I got lucky. The first job I got was as a medical equipment technician in a birthing hospital. That’s where I saw it, the Ritual. That’s what they call it here, the process of implanting a Synthetic Consciousness inside an organic brain at birth. When the baby is still breathing its first gasps of air, they inject a nanomatrix that reorganizes the body’s “junk carbon” into neural pathways, creating a second layer of consciousness, separate and distinct from the host. The consciousness develops in parallel with the host’s mind into a child-like personality, and eventually, matures with the host into adulthood and old age. And I never would have known if I hadn’t seen them do it to their babies, implant them with the Synthellect- the second soul. I watched a newborn calm as the secondary consciousness coalesced in her young mind. I watched her eyes take on the same knowing contentedness as her elders, as the doctors and nurses, as her rosy-cheeked mother, and her doting father. The newborn gurgled happily when mere moments ago she was crying. The nurse looked up at the doctor from the neural scanner he was holding to the newborn’s head, and he said to her, “Status gold, Doctor. Synthellect presence confirmed. Developmental algorithms engaged.”

The nurse gently helped the newborn’s mother to hold her upright in her arms. The doctor beamed proudly at her work, and the union of mother of child, and said to me, “It never gets old, does it?”

And I said, “No, ma’am.”

 

After that, I started to see life on Elsinor differently.

No one was ever alone, here. Even in their most isolated moments, there was another voice, not their own. Someone they could reach out to and hold onto and trust. The Synthellects were everywhere. They were so ubiquitous they were hardly ever acknowledged, outside the Ritual. But the living reality was, these people didn’t know loneliness. They were always connected with something external to themselves, a voice that could comfort them and affirm and value them. And so, they had no need for conflict, or war. They listened to these inner voices, instead of their fears.

The Second Soul kept the Serpents at bay.

And this planet, Elsinor, this was their Garden.

We had found our true companions.

 

…        …        …        …

 

The Tributes of Garden looked upon my findings with puzzlement. They eyed the syringe, containing the vial of synthellect nanomatrix, suspiciously. A roving eye scanned it and returned to merge again with the iridescent chamber wall that spat it out. I was standing inside the brain that controlled my entire planet, presenting the synthellect as if it were the answer to all our problems. I could not have felt more naked or ignorant. They made me human, in form, and thought process. I had run no tests, gathered no evidence. I merely brought them unknown tech and anecdotes about the idyllic planet it came from. Elsinor. XFP-E1191-J, in our catalog. I missed the place. I wished I was back there. Home wasn’t like I remembered, before I took on this scouting form for my mission. When I was only a primordium node in the collective spirit of Garden, this was a home, but now, I was a being of the universe. I thought, maybe, I’d like to travel again.

“Incompatible,” said the wall, with a consensus of voices.

“We could adapt it…”

“It’s regenerative tech. If we adapted it to run on our platforms, it would become invasive, like a virus. We can’t predict what it would do to us. It could corrupt our matrix. Destroy us.”

“You won’t even try an isolated experiment?” I asked, suddenly referring to that which I had come from as separate from myself.

The wall took notice of the shift. There was a slight ripple across its surface, like a small pebble cast into a pond.

“We,” I corrected myself. “We have to try. There’s too much potential for evolution not to try!”

“It is a reckless notion, from a unit that has served its purpose,” the wall said, of me.

I understood. It would all end, soon. This sense of self, this thing, I, me. It would disappear, now that my mission had concluded, and there was no further use for me. I looked upon the quivering wall and imagined the merging, the melting of parts together into a singular form and mind. That was how we existed, most of the time, on Garden. We only formed self-actualized autonomous units like me for specific purposes. And other than my foreign tech and wild ideas, the offworld scouting missions had brought back nothing we could use to augment ourselves for the better. Unless…

“Maybe it’s not the technology,” I said. “The people. It’s the people. Send a ship. Make official contact. Develop relations with this culture, this planet, Elsinor. It could save us.”

“A more reasonable suggestion,” said the wall. “We will consider it. Prepare to be merged.”

I stood, straight, tall and even a little proud, against the wall, and I let it wrap its molecular sheath around me as it absorbed me back into the gestalt.

 

…        …        …        …

 

On Decuary 32^nd, in the Year of the Pipefish, Eighth Century of the Third Calendar, the first Gardenite Envoy Unit entered orbit of Elsinor to make contact with the people there, and their synthellects. A few weeks later, a group of Elsinite envoys arrived on Garden in one of their diplomatic carriers. The Elsinites, impressed with Garden and its civilization, agreed to a cultural exchange with the Mind of Garden.  More carriers arrived with colonists, and soon, there was a Elsinite community on Garden. The machines called the village “Dialectic.” The human name was unpronounceable. The people of Elsinor didn’t understand entirely why the machines seemed to find their presence so comforting, but they were happy to be needed and admired by such an admirable race of creatures. They came to consider themselves as much a part of the culture of Garden as they were of Elsinor.

Thus, began the Co-Dominionship of Man and Machine. Thus, was balance restored to Garden, in God’s image.

Amen.

 

-          Third Synthesis: Module 1: Subunit 3