Science & Tech Quote by Karel Capek

Capek’s line lands like a sly correction to the usual technophobia: the real threat isn’t the machine, it’s the wage. Coming from the writer who gave the world the word “robot” (from the Czech robota, meaning forced labor), the sentence reads less like optimism about industry and more like an indictment of the economic bargain that makes “progress” feel inevitable. Machinery doesn’t enslave; the conditions around it do.

The phrasing is deliberately conditional and pointed. “If” turns the whole claim into a moral test for modernity, and “paid enough” is an almost insulting simplicity that exposes how often societies treat decent compensation as utopian. Capek is also needling the fantasy that human freedom is preserved by maintaining “human control” over technology. The man “tending the machine” is already in a hierarchy: he’s not the inventor, not the owner, not the policymaker. His agency depends on whether he can afford to say no.

The subtext is anti-romantic about both labor and innovation. Automation anxiety, then as now, is often narrated as fate: gears replace hands, algorithms replace minds. Capek insists it’s a political choice disguised as a technical one. Pay workers well and machinery becomes leverage, reducing drudgery. Starve them and the same machinery becomes discipline, speeding up the line, narrowing options, turning people into accessories.

Written in the interwar shadow of mass production and rising authoritarianism, it’s a warning: exploitation doesn’t arrive wearing chrome. It arrives as “efficiency,” backed by paychecks that aren’t enough to refuse.