WHO FEARS A ROBO-LUTION? 

What if we lived in a society where human labour became completely replaced by robot servants? 

What if we made them so perfect that they became able to transcend their servitude, and to rebel against us? 

What if they outnumbered us? What if they replaced humanity? 

Artificial servants and their potential effects on society have been thought about for centuries - from the ancient Greeks' 'automatae' to the bee drones in 'Black Mirror'.

Today, when we say 'robot', we use a term that was introduced one century ago by the Czech playwriter Karel Čapek. On January 2, 1921, he presented his play to the world, simultaneously introducing an alternative reality where humans found the scientific recipe to replicate human bodies and use them as tools of production.

While 'R.U.R.' (Rossum's Universal Robots) starts as a utopia where humanity is free from hard labour, it flows into questioning the ethics of such enterprise, and dangerously imagines: "What if robots revolted?"
The play then presents a scenario of entire human annihilation.

It would be easy to confine such an extreme scenario to the imaginary. But what if the play contained more possibles than impossibles?
What if it was a mere reflection of existing societies? What if it was an accurate prediction of presents to come? 
How to reflect on it today, in the bloom of technologies and artificial intelligences? 

Does it make any sense to fear a robot revolution? 

What if it was too late already? 

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