R.U.R.: What a Baylor Play About Robots Tells Us About Humanity

The word “robot” was used publicly for the first time ever on January 25th, 1921 when Czech author Karel Čapek premiered his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). Čapek took the word from an old Czech word (rabu) meaning “slave.” On December 7th, 2025 in Baylor’s Mabee theater, Rossum’s Universal Robots took the stage once again.

Although the play was known for its technological imaginativeness, it is more about humans than it is about robots, says Eva Hruska, a Baylor Russian professor who provided the translation of R.U.R. used in Baylor’s production. Hruska described the plot succinctly: “human-made beings, now for the first time ever called ‘robots,’ wipe humanity off the face of the earth, only to be succeeded by Robots-turned-human—the new Adam and Eve… it is not the progress and the humanoid robots themselves that Čapek warns about. It is the surrender of humans to greed, power, and money in the name of progress.” 

The mere thought experiment of robots allowed Čapek to gain profound insights about human nature. Čapek contrasted humans with robots, and asked what was unique to humans. In this age of AI, we should all be doing what Čapek did, and we are better equipped. We don’t need to have his brilliant imagination to explore the concept of the robot, we only need to read the news. Anyone interested in what it means to be human should research what human tasks AI can and cannot complete. Like Čapek, we should ask what makes us different. 

Kiley Towne, a Baylor student pursuing a Master’s of Fine Arts in directing, chose R.U.R. as her final project because she loved “how timely it is for our contemporary society.” Towne noted that the play was also relevant to the time it was written—in the midst of the rapid technological acceleration of the Industrial Revolution. The recurring question the script prompted among the actors and creative team was “what’s the difference between these humanoid, bioengineered robots and a human?” Towne said. 

Parker Wallace, a Baylor sophomore who played Primus, one of the lead robots, had to wrestle with this question very practically. Throughout the play, Parker said, “we play with the evolution of robots becoming human.” Parker’s own character begins as merely a robot, but develops human traits like fluid movements and emotion over the course of the play. 

Ashton White, a junior, played Builder Alquist, a human who expresses reservations about running society on robot work. White reflected that “every character, robot or human, has something to say about the human experience.” White said that Alquist “believes in the human ability to work and create, and that he thinks that’s what separates us from the robots, but he also thinks that’s what defines humanity.” When Alquist’s friends want to transfer human labor to robots, Alquist believes they are “giving up one of the greatest aspects of being human.”

When asked what Alquist might think of our current society, White laughed. “I think Alquist would absolutely despise AI right about now. Alquist would ask: ‘what do humans do besides consume?’ He has a bit of an aside where he starts to talk about the fact that humans do nothing but eat, but the robots are feeding people.” 

Kiana Pantellaleaver, a junior, played two characters: Helena, the beautiful wife of the robot factory director, and the beautiful robot Helena, created in the human Helena’s image. Both Helenas are repeatedly described as useless. “In the robot world,”  Pantellaleaver said, “her beauty means nothing to them.” Robot Helena was created to be beautiful, but “a robot’s only use is to work, to build things, and to create.” However, in the end of the play, Helena is one of only two robots that is able to become human.

The robots in R.U.R. are not engineered only to be like humans, they are made to be better. Harry Domin, the director of the robot factory, tells Helena that the best worker is “the one that is the cheapest.” In order to build this worker, the engineer had to “take out everything that did not directly serve the purpose of work. This way he actually took out the human and created a Robot.” Helena seems to doubt these high aspirations, observing that “they say that a human is the work of God.” Domin responds with the flippant arrogance of a utopian: “God did not have a clue about modern technology.”

The robots were created in the image of man, and, in the end, they fail because they are both too similar and not similar enough. Over the course of the play, the engineers discover that the qualities they were so quick to discard—happiness, love, pain, and beauty, may have been more important to humanity than they thought. 

But in some ways, robots are more like man than their engineers anticipated. When the robots have killed every human but one, the remaining human asks why they destroyed them. A robot responds, “you have to kill and rule, if you want to be like people. Read your history!” Humans fell because they aspired to be like God. Čapek’s robots fell because they aspired to be like the corrupted likeness of God in man. 

Philosophers throughout history, most famously Aristotle and Cicero, studied humans by comparing them to animals. Čapek is doing the same thing with his hypothetical robots. Which qualities can humans and robots share? Which are unique to humans? 

Čapek seems to propose that, if a robot is better than humans at factory work, then maybe factory work is a less human occupation. If AI can get a passing grade on an essay, then maybe the way we do education isn’t as human as we thought it was. If ChatGPT is better at bedside manner than human doctors, then maybe the way we show love to strangers needs to be more human. Observing AI’s capabilities can teach us what is and isn’t uniquely human, and where we are deficient.

As a writer, I have found this personally convicting. When I write lazily, I choose my words like an LLM does: based on common word associations I have heard rather than an intentional examination of the word’s meaning. My favorite writing, especially my favorite poetry, places words next to each other that are usually not associated but advance the writer’s unique meaning. For nature writer Robert MacFarlane, crow calls “hex” off of cliffs rather than echoing. For humorist P.G. Wodehouse, a man with a hangover sees his butler “shimmer” into the room rather than stride. 

AI ethicist Mark Coeckelbergh wrote that “robots are used as purification tools: instruments that keep open the divide, that guard the borders between human and nonhuman.” However AI ends up harming or helping our society, our understanding of AI has the potential to inspire real advances in the philosophy of what it means to be human.