"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"
About this Quote
Capek draws blood with a velvet glove: the line sounds like polite reassurance, but it’s really a warning shot about what modernity is starting to worship. “My dear Miss Glory” frames the statement as genteel common sense, the way elites launder anxiety into etiquette. It’s also gendered and patronizing on purpose: the speaker is performing calm authority while the world underneath him is shifting. That’s the tension Capek thrives on in R.U.R., where “robot” is born not as cute gadgetry but as a labor category, a system.
The argument is built on a nasty little paradox. Robots are “mechanically more perfect” and intellectually “astounding,” yet still disqualified from personhood by the absence of “soul.” Capek isn’t doing theology for its own sake; he’s dramatizing how humans defend hierarchy when confronted with beings (or workers) who expose the fraud of human superiority. If intelligence and efficiency aren’t enough, the goalposts move to something unmeasurable. “Soul” becomes the ultimate biometric: convenient, unverifiable, and socially enforceable.
The subtext lands harder in Capek’s moment: an industrial Europe enthralled by Fordist optimization and haunted by mass death, where bodies have already been treated as replaceable parts. Calling robots “not people” is less a neutral definition than a legal fiction, the kind that makes exploitation feel tidy. Capek’s real target isn’t the machine; it’s the human desire to turn moral questions into engineering specs. In that sense, the quote reads like a preemptive critique of every era that confuses performance with humanity and then acts surprised when the performance asks for rights.
The argument is built on a nasty little paradox. Robots are “mechanically more perfect” and intellectually “astounding,” yet still disqualified from personhood by the absence of “soul.” Capek isn’t doing theology for its own sake; he’s dramatizing how humans defend hierarchy when confronted with beings (or workers) who expose the fraud of human superiority. If intelligence and efficiency aren’t enough, the goalposts move to something unmeasurable. “Soul” becomes the ultimate biometric: convenient, unverifiable, and socially enforceable.
The subtext lands harder in Capek’s moment: an industrial Europe enthralled by Fordist optimization and haunted by mass death, where bodies have already been treated as replaceable parts. Calling robots “not people” is less a neutral definition than a legal fiction, the kind that makes exploitation feel tidy. Capek’s real target isn’t the machine; it’s the human desire to turn moral questions into engineering specs. In that sense, the quote reads like a preemptive critique of every era that confuses performance with humanity and then acts surprised when the performance asks for rights.
Quote Details
| Topic | Artificial Intelligence |
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