The Relationship Between Technical Objects and Human Beings : A Comparative Study of R.U.R. and Klara and the Sun

Technical objects can be seen not so much as expressions of the times as a part of human culture but rather as a kind of cultural tools. Today, technical objects are omnipresent in all cultures, and Gilbert Simondon calls for “the integration of a representation of technical realities into culture” (208). This means a shift from seeing technology as an external force to recognizing its role within human social, emotional, and ethical life. The human being is among and with machines. Thus the relationship between technical objects and human beings is not explained in terms of instrumentality but expressed in terms of community or coevolution. For Simondon, technical reality is a type of relation that a living being has to its milieu since the history of human technologies shows that the technical object is also a relation in itself. This paper aims to predict that in the past, technical objects (robots) were considered as a threat to human labor but as technology advances, the roles of human beings and technical objects in society will continue to change and ultimately, in the future, the relationship between human beings and technical objects (AI) will continuously co-evolve. To pursue this goal, based on the concept of “the essence of technical objects and their relation to man”(vii) proposed by Simondon in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (2017), this paper aims to compare and analyze the relationship between human beings and the Robots appearing in the play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots 1920) by Czech playwright Karel Čapek, who first introduced the word “robot” to human history, and that between human beings and the artificial friend(AF) Klara in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun (2021).