“Each factory will be making Robots of a different color, a different nationality, a different tongue; [...] they'll no longer be able to conspire with one another...” –– Karel Čapek, R.U.R., 1920.

“How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?” ― Stanisław Lem, Solaris, 1961

The second online event in a series of workshops on AI Narratives in Central and Eastern Europe will take place on 15 January 2021 and focus on the representations of intelligent machines in Eastern European SF, with a particular focus on the works of Karel Čapek and Stanisław Lem. 

Karel Čapek was a Czech playwright who coined the word “robot” – used for the first time in the play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which premiered on 25 January 1921, exactly a century ago. Stanisław Lem was a Polish science fiction writer and philosopher, and the author of Solaris (1961) and The Futurological Congress (1971). Lem was born in 1921 and, to mark the anniversary, 2021 has been declared ‘the year of Lem’ in Poland. Our workshop is a celebration of these two centenaries.

Program:

Start: 11:00 AM (CET)

11:00 - 11:10 – Opening remarks: Dr Kanta Dihal (CFI, University of Cambridge)

11:10 - 12:10 – Panel 1. Polish AI Narratives and Stanisław Lem. Chair: Dr Vít Střítecký.

• Dr Jerzy Stachowicz (University of Warsaw): “The First Robotic Moment: Artificial Humans in Polish SF literature before World War II”

• Dr Bogna Konior (NYU Shanghai): “Automatic Gnosis: On Lem's Summa Technologiae.”

• Michał Sobczyk (The Lem Institute): “How Lem's literary legacy is shaping the perception of technological progress in Poland?”

12:10 - 12:30 – Break

12:30 - 1:30 Panel 2. Karel Čapek: a hundred years of robots. Chair: Dr Vít Střítecký.

• Dr Klára Kudlová (Czech Academy of Sciences): “Features of AI and Humanness: Karel Čapek's R.U.R.”

• Dr Libuše Heczková (Charles University): “Science, Technology and Karel Čapek's Skepticism.”

• Dr Rudolf Rosa, Patrícia Schmidtová and Klára Vosecká (THEaiTRE project): “Inverting R.U.R. with Artificial Intelligence: THEaiTRobot is Generating a Theatre Play Script to Mark 100 Years of Čapek's Work.”
  

Finish: 1:30 PM (CET)