Will robots and/or Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) take over the world?

Robots were dreamt up 100 years ago – why haven’t our fears about them changed since?

The play R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots, by Czech playwright Karl Čapek. And it is now 100 years old, having first been staged in Prague on January 25, 1921.

R.U.R. is important for a lot of reasons. It is universally celebrated as the work of art that gave the world the very word “robot”. What is less often remarked that R.U.R. also gave us the basic plot of so very many of our stories about robots and AI that have been made in the last hundred years.

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