RUR and the Robot Government: Collective drama about the humankind, with a perspective epilogue on the silicic law

Abstract

RUR, which stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots, is the title of a play by Karel Čapek that introduced the neologism Robot into global culture. Written in 1920, it tells the story of a multinational corporation responsible for the creation of the artificial man, his exploitation in the world of work and, eventually, the outbreak of a destructive war between humans and artificial workers. As Corduas has noted, RUR is not simply a successful drama about the end of the humankind, but a real cultural unity that, across all Western cultures, shapes common horizons of meaning, fears and responsibilities, ranging from an awareness of the inexorability and benefits of hybridisation between the biological and technological worlds to reasonable fears of the risks implicit in transhumanist and posthumanist agendas. It also articulates the need to ultimately take responsibility for controlling this process of on- tological modifying living matter without falling into enthusiastic exaggera- tions about technological progress or anachronistic naturalistic prejudices. If one accepts that literature envisages plausible future scenarios and allows one to approach them with historical and politico-legal problematics, then RUR is the appropriate scenario for jurists who wish to engage in a dialogue about the impact that new technologies have and will have on the categories and concepts of classical legal thought, as well as about the need to build a bridge between the old organic conception of law and the urgent silicic perspective.