RUR Technology and Modernization Quotes

Old Rossum dreams a dream of technological change and transformation, which is also the dream of evolution. Technology and biology are hard to split apart for Old Rossum. He seems to think they're one and the same.

Progress here isn't just in the form of inventions. It's about production processes. Young Rossum didn't invent robots, but he did figure out how to make them on the assembly line. Modernity isn't just scientific advances. It's the ability to make the same thing over and over a lot.

Does any acceleration constitute progress? What about killing people faster? Is that progress? Or is it the opposite of progress? Domin will get to find out (insert ominous music here).

The "same old progress" here means the robots are rebelling and the world is coming to an end. Alquist is a progress skeptic. New technology and new modernization just means going to hell in a shinier machine.

Hallemeier puts his faith in order, regimentation, and the factory clock. A train schedule is greater, he says, than all art and philosophy. You're not really supposed to believe him though. Not long after he's reminded that the robots get everywhere on time the better to kill everyone on earth. It'd be better if they'd stayed up late reading Kant and missed that train.

Modernization here is presented as a rush of quantity and a loss of diversity. Gall is oppressed not by the existence of one robot, but by the mass production of robots. He's upset because there has been a loss of individual craftsmanship. You'd think there'd be other more important things to think about at the end of the world, but some folks just really like their robots handmade.

Busman is explaining how capitalism works. The consumers demand the product, the producers make it. There's ultimately no one at fault. It's a system for doing things without blaming anyone for it. So you can get the end of the world, and no one's to blame. That's an ingenious technological marvel if there ever was one.

Fabry is talking to a lamp, here. This sort of makes sense, since a lamp is a product of human ingenuity and knowledge. It's also kind of funny and ridiculous though—a lamp is just a lamp. It's a miracle, but it's also an everyday piece of clutter. Technology is often about being unable to tell the one from the other.

Alquist can't believe that no one wrote down the formula for creating robots. Yeah, we can't really believe it either. It's pretty much… unbelievable. The factory was making hundreds of thousands of robots. For every one they had to go consult the same sheet of paper? Come on, now. No, they didn't write it down because the play needed the technology to fail, or be withdrawn. The plot required modernization to go backwards, for science to be undiscovered. In reality, that rarely happens. Or if it does, it takes a lot of time. Here, though, the play just chucks the unwanted technology into a plot hole.

Science has historically involved live experiments and brutality to people—the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments on black men actually occurred after this play was written. Some of the worries about technology in R.U.R. are silly. Making robots won't make all women on Earth become infertile. But the ugly dissection of Damon, torturing him for no good reason and no useful outcome—that is the sort of thing that science in fact will do, if you don't watch it closely.