"We beg to acknowledge receipt of order for fifteen thousand Robots"
Kasper Stoy
The English translation of the essay " Potvrzujeme objednávku na patnáct tisíc robotů"
from the Czech book Robot 100: Sto rozumů, edited by Jitka ÄŒejková,
published by the University of Chemistry and Technology Prague (Vysoká škola chemicko-technologická v Praze) in 2020
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One of the many mind-blowing aspects of Rossum's Universal Robots was the scale of the robot revolution and the production capabilities that supported it. In the beginning of the play, Domin dictates a letter to Sulla that acknowledges the receipt of an order for five thousand robots and another letter that acknowledges the receipt of an order for fifteen thousand robots. Twenty thousand robots! If one assumes that this represents a normal order intake for a day, Rossum's Universal Robots receives orders of 7.3 million robots per year! This is a large number of robots, but it is too low to make robots as numerous as men. One hundred years ago, the world had an estimated 1.7 billion people. Hence, it would take Rossum's Universal Robots 232 years to achieve this goal. However, Domin was of course aware of this and had a scale-up model in mind: "We’re doing away with the centralized production in one factory, and we’ll no longer make Universal Robots. From now on, we’ll build factories in every country and every state, and you know what those new factories will produce, don’t you?" Domin had one significant advantage compared to today. His robots were grown from protoplasm, which seemed to resemble a biological process that maybe explained his manufacturing capabilities. His robots also appear remarkably cheap to make: "One hundred and twenty dollars for a fully clothed unit that fifteen years ago cost ten thousand!" This was of course in 1920 dollars so today it would correspond to $2200 — but still cheap for a fully functioning humanoid robot.
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The scale of the robot production in Rossum's Universal Robots is staggering, but surprisingly, it is not very far off from our manufacturing capabilities of robots today. In 2020, one hundred years after the play was written, around five hundred thousand industrial robot arms, a similar number of service robots, and a staggering 3 million drones were sold worldwide. In other words, we can almost compete with Domin in terms of number of robots, as we are producing half the number compared to him. However, we have to use the combined factories of all robot manufacturers and sub-suppliers compared to Rossum's single factory. Despite the fact that robots are complex mechatronic systems and not biologically grown, we are able to make them more cheaply than Domin. Small toy drones can be manufactured for tens of dollars. Only the most advanced robot arms are more expensive to produce, costing an estimated fifteen thousand dollars.
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While the scale of Domin's operation, at a first glance, seems impossibly large, it is a true testament to human skill that we today have already, in some aspects, have passed his level of manufacturing capabilities. Although keep in mind that the capabilities of today’s robots are much lower than the ones produced by Rossum's Universal Robots—but that is another story.