Robots, Automata, the Imaginary of Slavery and Hybridization: How Antiquity Prepares us for Technological Revolutions

Karel Čapek coined the neologism robot on a Slavic linguistic basis – a term that, together with vampire, has entered the international lexicon. Embedded in it are the meanings of work and slave. The ancient imaginary was formed according to the same pattern, and Čapek had clear precedents. One such precedent was ancient bodily hybridization, attested not only by ancient painting – especially vase drawings – but also by texts describing hybrid beings. Another precedent lay in ancient practices documented as early as the fourth century BCE: alongside innovative machines for warfare, navigation, urban comfort, scientific experimentation, and measurement of all kinds, master technicians also produced an entire array of machines – many in human form – for domestic enjoyment and public spectacle, such as performances before temples, household wine-pouring devices, miniature theaters for street and home, and the like. Fantasies of slavery and hybridization were already unmistakably intertwined in these ancient proto-models. Mechanisms such as the Antikythera analog computer demonstrate how far this technology had advanced. Leonardo da Vinci’s military and carnival robots mark a new beginning of robotism, which reached its peak in the eighteenth century with automata-performers. In today’s real world – where military and labor robots predominate, while popular culture supplements the fantasy with thinking robots – the robot absorbs and radiates the horror of exploitation in all its forms and psychological dangers: it is a polyvalent symbol of capitalism, the greatest contemporary threat to humanity.