The little food delivery robot pauses
on the corner of campus to cross the street.
Its body is a white rectangular box the size
of a child's toy wagon. It has a lid that locks,
ultrasonic sensors, a curb-climbing system,
a message flag. Czech writer Karel Čapek's 1920
science fiction play "R.U.R." was the first
to use the word robota, Slavonic for servitude
or forced labor. Slave, in other words. A company
creates a cadre of robota from organic matter— the play
describes vats of bones and brains, funnels with
skin; nerves, arteries, intestines (whose?)
and soon, the world economy is fully robot-based.
But just like in many fantasies about artificial life,
the robots turn against the humans, until only one
is left: the clerk of works, who works with his hands
like a robot. What happens next? The human clerk
tells a pair of gendered robots that they are
the new Adam and Eve, and must go forth
to remake the world. One problem: they don't
have the formula for manufacturing more of
themselves. I saw an ad in which delivery
robots, named after interplanetary
spacecraft, deliver factory samples as well
as food orders. One cuts through a brick court-
yard, leaf-dappled. Another runs along a raised
path perhaps with a tray of broccoli and
beef while below, sheep run through a field.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
