인공지능과 이어 밀리언 시대의 인간의 조건이란 무엇인가? : 카렐 차페크의 『로봇』과 영국 드라마 『휴먼스』를 중심으로

Abstract

This paper examines the important quality of human beings living in the Year Million, a new concept of era for our future through Karel Capek’s Robot (Rossum’s Universal Robots) and Humans, a British TV drama. Capek is one of the prominent Czech writers who was deeply interested in the material civilization and human mentality. He foresaw and satirized the human attitude that avoids labor and enjoys their convenience by making robots, finally resulting in being destroyed by their own creature, robots. In this play, he uses the word ‘robot’ which means ‘labor’ in Czech for the first time in the world and shows his keen insight into the future. The final scene of this play shows new AI humanoid robots which can love each other and feel all kinds of human emotions, meaning there might be at least a bright hope for the future of our world. Humans is the popular TV drama in England which starts 2015 and shows the multi-layered aspects of our lives facing the problematic issues about AI with consciousness. There are several families in this drama, dealing with uncanny cracks and the emotion changes of the characters which are quite thought-provoking for us. According to the director’s explanation, the theme of this drama is “what happens when these Synths are given the right to consciousness and their own free will?” that will be the most serious question for us soon or later. Even though these two works deal with the dark side of our future, both have the same theme as well as a bottom line; ‘love’ which gives us hope and energy is the most important element for our better future.