R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)
Karel Čapek, 1920 — fiction.
The play that gave the world the word robot — coined from the Czech robota, compulsory labor, at the suggestion of the author's brother Josef — published in 1920 and premiered at Prague's National Theatre in January 1921. The verified anticipation is lexical and structural, not mechanical: within a few years the word was in every major language, and the play's economics have aged better than its engineering. Artificial workers are adopted universally because they undercut human labor; dependence compounds; and a management board keeps shipping through visible warning signs because each incremental batch is individually rational. Filed with its misses stated: Čapek's robots are grown from synthetic organic matter, not assembled from metal — wrong substrate, correct labor market.
Marked passages
The adoption spiral, summarized: robots are cheaper than workers, so every firm must buy them or lose to the firm that does; production without labor makes goods nearly free while wages evaporate; and the crisis arrives through the payroll long before it arrives through the uprising.
Automation displacement modeled as competitive lock-in, 1920. The TEC-04 agent-workweek projection scores the identical mechanism with current deployment data — the incentive geometry has not changed, only the substrate.
The board meeting, summarized: the directors of Rossum's island factory see every warning sign and vote to continue anyway — demand is enormous, a competitor would fill any pause, and each decision is locally sound right up to the machines' general strike.
Capability racing under competitive pressure: no villain required, only a payoff matrix. The same governance failure sequence the technology domain scores from social media through frontier AI.
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