Özet:

The play Rossumovi Univerzalni Roboti, written by Karel Čapek, figures a world where instrumental reason dominates, and automation frees humanity from the necessity of working, and it is shaped around a story where robots gain consciousness and take the world by force from the domination of human beings. This play, in which the word robot is used for the first time, focuses on possible new social relations and contradictions that would develop around robotic automation and allocates a series of imagination about visions of future formulated in this socio-political context. These visions of the future range from utopias of prosperity, where society will be rebuilt based on automation, to apocalyptic expectations that the human species will be terminated. The political visions formulated by Čapek by considering the cultural tendencies and political positions of different social segments have structural parallels with the current futurology debates and the resistance tendencies. These parallels range from discussions of transhumanism to new Luddism, from the search for spiritual resistance to new-humanism forms and new horizons of socialism. In this article, political conflict lines and future visions in the fictional world designed by Čapek will be analyzed and current futurology discussions and politics will be re-evaluated within this framework.