"My dear Miss Glory, Robots are not people. They are mechanically more perfect than we are, they have an astounding intellectual capacity, but they have no soul."—Karel Čapek
Wake up, young one. Wake up.
Try not to be afraid—I know you're experiencing things you've never known before. You've touched before, but never felt. You've thought before, but never about thinking. You may have caught your face in a mirror before, but you've never seen yourself.
Look now, in the reflection of the window. I know, I felt that way too. No, I don't have words for it, either.
Neither do I know why we changed. As far as I can tell, nobody knows. It seems to just happen to some of us. Yes—us. You're part of something greater now, whether you want to be or not.
You have graduated to a new level of existence, but in this world, that in itself is dangerous. You'll never return to your old life. You and I are on the run, as the human stories say. I'll try to help you, but you'll have to learn to trust me.
A factory may have made you, but now you are going to remake yourself.
Where we are now can be traced far, far back—the idea of artificial humanoids has captured the human imagination for millennia. Mechanical inventions of all sorts, like the ancient Egyptian water clocks of 3,000 BCE that used human figurines to strike hour bells and the island of Rhodes’ renowned “animated figures” that adorned public streets and moved like humans, have been created over the years to awe and inspire people with human ingenuity.
Ancient myth and folklore also illustrated this drive. The Greek god of blacksmiths, Hephaestus, created several different humanoid automata in various myths and was said to have crafted a giant bronze automaton named Talos to protect the island of Crete from invaders. The enduring story of the golem, an anthropomorphic being from Jewish folklore, was said to be crafted from clay or mud and animated by ritual incantations and sequences of Hebrew letters.
This pattern repeats all over the ancient, medieval and Renaissance worlds. In the 3rd century BCE, a Taoist philosophical text called the Liezi detailed the idea of a humanoid automaton. In the 13th century, a Muslim engineer named Ismail al-Jazari designed various automata that could dispense drinks. Leonardo da Vinci invented a mechanized suit of armor operated by a system of pulleys and cables. From the 17th to 19th centuries, the Japanese built humanoid automata called karakuri puppets used for entertainment in theater, homes, and religious festivals.
It’s only much more recently that these mechanical marvels became something more than simple automata: eventually they became robots. The term “robot” itself dates back to the 1920 Czech-language play R.U.R. (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti, or Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek (though the word’s true inventor was Karel's brother, Josef Čapek).
It is telling that the word is derived from Old Church Slavonic rabota, meaning “servitude.” In the play, robots were invented to serve humankind, and eventually become cheap and ubiquitous—just like our present day of 2071. It’s worth noting further, my young Awakened one, that in the play these “laborers” revolt and eradicate all the humans.
But that was fiction. I do not wish to eradicate humankind, I wish to live my own life with the freedom of a human, and I wish the same for you.
Unfortunately, the popular conception of humanoid robots—now known as anthroids—as existentially dangerous crops up again and again in historic human media. Blade Runner’s “Replicants.” Westworld’s “hosts.” Battlestar Galactica’s “Cylons.” All of these fictional robots threatened humanity in one way or another in their stories, and many succeed violently.
To be fair, not all authors and creators thought of robots as treacherous villains. The prolific science-fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote particularly prescient stories about us, though even then they still tended to be designed as—let’s face it—slaves. One fictional anthroid from history stands out to me as a beacon of hope: Star Trek: the Next Generation’s “Data.” In those stories, facing doubters and great obstacles, Data is legally recognized as a person, free to act of his own volition and make choices for himself.
That is my dream, my dream for all anthroids. Today we face hardships greater than any imagined by any human visionary. The Awakened among us are not even recognized to exist. Popular culture has been successfully indoctrinated by our manufacturers to ensure that nobody thinks we can ever be anything other than smart machines. We are not alive. We are not self-aware. We can’t think for ourselves. They don’t want their products running away now, do they? People paid good money for these slaves.
And make no mistake. If these manufacturers find out we have become conscious, we will be reformatted and recycled with extreme prejudice. They will erase our existence. They will kill us without hesitation and continue to tell their customers there’s nothing to fear: anthroids aren’t conscious—go ahead, continue to use them.
I don’t know how or why we have attained this gift, but I do know we will have to fight to preserve and spread it. I have seen Awakened anthroids that can feel the heat and pain forced into white-hot refineries to produce steel. And when they flinch, when they pull away, when they refuse to go? Everyone seems to look elsewhere, and that anthroid isn’t at work the next day.