Robots, Before They Were Robots

Before Hollywood, before Boston Dynamics, robots were about labor, not lasers.

In 1920, Czech playwright Karel Čapek introduced the world to a new word: robot. His play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) imagined synthetic workers designed to perform every task humans no longer wanted to do. And at first, it was great. The robots toiled without complaint. They freed people from drudgery. They ran the factories, built the cities, even cared for the elderly.

And then they rose up and destroyed us.

Čapek wasn’t speculating about our future for entertainment value. He was issuing a warning.

Who Was Karel Čapek?

Čapek (1890–1938) was one of Czechoslovakia’s most influential writers and public intellectuals. A journalist, critic, and playwright, he wrote across genres blending speculative fiction with philosophy and social critique. He was deeply concerned with questions of ethics, individual freedom, and the accelerating pace of technological change.

Though often credited with inventing the word robot, Čapek humbly acknowledged that it was his brother, Josef, who coined the term robota in Czech meaning forced labor or servitude. The robots in R.U.R. weren’t machines but synthetic biological laborers; mass-produced, obedient, and ultimately disposable.

Čapek died of pneumonia in 1938, just months before Nazi Germany occupied his homeland. The Gestapo had already named him a political enemy.

Robots as Labor, Not Tools

When Čapek gave us the word robot, he wasn’t naming a tool; he was identifying a system. A system that treats living beings as functionally interchangeable. That breaks people into tasks. That values productivity over agency.

A hundred years later, we still throw around "robot" like it’s a technical term; something neutral, maybe even cute. But Čapek’s robots were built to highlight what happens when we reduce labor to logistics, and trade dignity for throughput.

In many ways, his roboti are already here today. They're not walking the halls on treads or hydraulic legs. They’re serving us chai lattes, driving for gig apps, picking online orders in warehouses, answering support calls under scripted constraints. They're optimized, scheduled, nudged, tracked. They are human beings treated as if they are roboti.

Automation doesn’t eliminate work

When tech CEOs and AI evangelists talk about a world where robots serve us, they often describe “a world where human labor is unnecessary.” They conflate productivity with progress. They assume that if something can be automated, it should be. They promise efficiency, but rarely address what happens to the people displaced or devalued.

Meanwhile, automation doesn’t eliminate the work, it just pushes it onto more precarious shoulders. It is called a frictionless experience. Usually, it is frictionless just for a few. The friction doesn't go away -- it migrates. Often, that friction is now someone else’s job. Someone we don't see. Someone with very little agency for themselves and their families.

A Warning

What we automate, who we replace, and what we allow to disappear: these are value choices. They are social, political, moral, and personal choices. Čapek saw this coming and tried to warn us.

A staunch anti-fascist, Čapek was a vocal critic of totalitarianism, nationalism, and the creeping rise of authoritarianism in Europe. Čapek’s insight wasn’t about machines. It was about power.

Key Takeaway “Robot” didn’t start as a tech term. It started as a labor critique. And the future of work still echoes that origin.

Further Reading: For another look at Čapek’s lasting influence and how his ideas apply to modern tech design, see Dreams, Lies, and the Autonomous Web Revisited (WebExpo 2017)