In January 1921, Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) opened in Prague and dragged the word “robot” out of linguistic obscurity: robota, the Czech term for the forced labor a serf owed his lord. “Čapek’s robots, they’re serfs, essentially,” says Alisa Zhulina, an associate professor of theatre studies at New York University, affiliated with
