The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

The modern terror of a robot apocalypse has its roots in the mechanized slaughter of World War I. The conflict produced death on an unprecedented scale, with machines like armored tanks, machine guns, and aerial bombs killing millions. Writers and soldiers from the era, such as the English poet Wilfred Owen, compared the fate of men on the battlefield to that of cattle in a slaughterhouse. The war also caused an “equine holocaust,” with 8 million horses dying from combat, disease, starvation, exposure, and exhaustion. This unprecedented, machine-driven brutality reshaped humanity’s relationship with technology and gave rise to the specter of human extinction brought about through human-made machines.

This historical trauma shaped two of the most influential dystopian works of the 20th century. The first, Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We (1921), portrays a futuristic totalitarian “OneState” where nature has been banished behind a “Green Wall.” Citizens are known only by numbers, and the state’s surgeons can perform a “Great Operation” to remove the part of the brain responsible for imagination, thus turning people into perfect cogs in the state machine.

The second work, Czech playwright Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1920), introduced the word “robot.” Karel and his brother Josef, also a writer, together coined roboti, whose root rab means “slave.