In January 1921, Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) opened in Prague and dragged the word “robot” out of linguistic obscurity: robota, the Czech term for the forced labor a serf owed his lord. “Čapek’s robots, they’re serfs, essentially,” says Alisa Zhulina, an a ssociate professor of theatre studies at New York University, affiliated with its Russian and Slavic Studies department, and author of Theater of Capital. Čapek’s robots were mass-produced people grown in vats, human in form but stripped of wages, rights, and will. R.U.R. was an economics play about a dream (or nightmare) capitalism has been taunting itself with ever since: a workforce that never tires, never strikes, and never demands a wage, until it does. A hundred and five years after its Prague premiere, the curtain has risen on the real thing, or at least its first act. Agility Robotics, maker of the bird-legged Digit, began trading on Nasdaq this month after a SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, and says it has more than $300 million in committed multi-year orders from customers including Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler, and Toyota’s Canadian manufacturing arm. Tesla says it has begun production of its Optimus humanoid on a former Fremont car line. OpenAI is moving more quietly. It has folded its stand-alone robotics team into its core research effort as its general-purpose models begin directly controlling robots, and it is developing its own humanoid, with a first demo targeted for 2027. That makes Control Room, the system OpenAI built to cut off a model’s output within 35 seconds of a stop order, matter well beyond chatbots. The company has already had to contain AI agents that slipped their sandbox. Look past the stage lights, though, and the humanoids are mostly still performing. The automation reshaping corporate payrolls rolls on wheels, swings on arms, or runs as software. And the risk Čapek dramatized, an economy that no longer needs to pay its people, won’t show up on any single company’s books. It appears only when you add the ledgers. The first robot to hold a real job was not a humanoid but a one-armed Unimate, which in 1961 clocked in at a General Motors plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey, pulling blistering die-cast parts from a press. It had no face, no legs, and no interest in resembling us. It offered something better for a balance sheet: repetition without fatigue, grievance, or lunch. Eventually, the robots with legs went into show business. Honda’s ASIMO bowed and climbed stairs until it retired in 2022 without ever holding a job. For half a century, the machines that worked had no legs, and the machines with legs had no work. U.S. manufacturing employment peaked near 19.6 million in 1979 and fell to about 11.5 million by 2010, a decline economists pin on automation but also on trade, especially with China, and on rising productivity. Čapek was no technophobe, and he was certainly no communist opposed to markets. He opposed communism and fascism alike, says Zhulina, who calls him “more a liberal than a communist.” Critics have long read R.U.R. as a warning against technology. Čapek saw a comedy: a play that pointed toward a better world while skewering the industrial fever of his day. Every era needs a new god to chase, and in his it was the efficient worker. Frederick Taylor’s 1911 The Principles of Scientific Management promised to wring the waste out of every motion on the factory floor. It landed just as Ford-style assembly lines were taking shape, when workers, treated as inputs, could be tuned to the line. Everyone, Zhulina says, was “thinking about how to make the worker really efficient and the machine really efficient and merge them together.” A century later, the ambition hasn’t died. It has just changed its body. Industry now has artificial intelligence, the mind. To complete the arrangement, it needs hands: humanoid robots. Washington bought into the chase. In March, First Lady Melania Trump welcomed Figure 03, a humanoid built by Figure AI, to the White House as her “first American-made humanoid guest.” “Very soon artificial intelligence will move from our mobile phones to humanoids that deliver utility,” she said, imagining a humanoid tutor she called Plato. The god to chase had a seat at the summit. Musk’s pitch for Optimus is Domin’s pitch from 1921 In Čapek’s play, Domin, the general manager of R.U.R., makes the sales pitch: robots mean “there will be no poverty.” Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has said Optimus will usher in an “age of abundance,” would recognize the script. The product has lagged the pitch. In 2022, Musk said Optimus could be ready toward the end of the following year for moderate-scale series production. By January 2026, he conceded Optimus was “not in usage in our factories in a material way,” and Tesla said it would end Model S and X production to clear Fremont floor space for the robot. Tesla’s latest shareholder letter says production has begun. But on the company’s Oct. 21 earnings call, Musk called it “early production,” said the ramp’s opening stretch is “shallow” and “somewhat bumpy,” and acknowledged that “there’s still parts of the design that are changing.” He conceded that the robots coming off the Fremont line don’t yet have perfected hands, that “quite a lot of work” remains on the AI, and that Tesla needs to build on the order of 10,000 or 20,000 robots just to generate the training data the software depends on. He put outside deliveries around the end of next year and said it will take “at least a year, maybe a little longer” to reach full production rates. Musk still maintained that “Optimus will be the biggest product on Earth.” He called it “a very big deal” and said “there is no one that is even close to Tesla with respect to a general-purpose humanoid robot.” On what happens to workers, though, Musk hasn’t hedged. In October 2025 he posted on X that “AI and robots will replace all jobs.” His answer to the human cost is one Domin never had to offer: a “universal high income” paid by federal checks, so far proposed only in another X post. It concedes the problem: if robots take the wages, someone has to replace the paychecks. It doesn’t say who funds them. “There’s an irony there,” says Erica Groshen, a senior economics advisor at Cornell University’s ILR School and former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 2013 to 2017. The camp now floating federal checks has long been “endorsing … very low taxes,” she noted. Checks that size need revenue, and the likeliest source is the nation’s biggest enterprises, in the AI industry and beyond. If automation’s gains flow to “owners of capital,” Groshen says, they “owe the rest of society taxes that can be used to compensate the losers.” At Amazon, the robots that matter roll on wheels Amazon, which this year ended Walmart’s 13-year run atop the 2026 Fortune 500, has been at this since it bought Kiva in 2012. In mid-2025 it said it had deployed its millionth robot, closing in on its human workforce of about 1.56 million employees, according to the Wall Street Journal. Xavier Van Chau, an Amazon spokesperson for AI and robotics, calls the fleet “the state of the art in physical AI”: robots that “process real-time data to make split-second decisions,” and robotic arms, with systems named Robin, Cardinal, Sparrow, and Vulcan, that use computer vision and machine learning to select, sort, and stow items. Its first humanoid, Agility’s Digit, began testing in October 2023 moving empty totes. Three years on, Amazon has not announced a deployment. “We’ve made investments in this space through the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund and have done limited testing of Agility’s Digit robot in our operations,” Van Chau said in a statement. “It’s clear that more research and development will be needed but we’re looking forward to the work ahead.” If Optimus is Tesla’s stage show, Digit is Amazon’s, with one difference: Amazon is an investor in the act, not its producer. Agility CEO Peggy Johnson has described Digit’s warehouse work at Fortune Brainstorm Tech. The larger plan does not need legs. Internal documents reported by the New York Times projected that automation could let Amazon avoid hiring more than 600,000 U.S. workers by 2033. Responding to that report, Van Chau said leaked documents “often paint an incomplete and misleading picture of our plans,” and that these appear to reflect “just one team,” not the company’s overall hiring strategy. “No company has created more jobs in America over the past decade than Amazon,” he said. Robots, he argues, create work too: “Facilities with advanced robotics require 30% more employees in reliability, maintenance, and engineering roles.” Headcount still rose in 2025, to about 1.58 million. The hiring curve may be flattening, not falling. Washington is sorting robots by birthplace, as Čapek’s owners tried to China is where the humanoid is being manufactured, if not yet where it is working. Chinese makers shipped more than 97% of the world’s humanoids in the first half of 2026, Bloomberg reported. Yet about 69% of humanoids went to research, education, exhibitions, and government data centers rather than production lines, according to IDC, down from 83.8% in 2025. On July 28, the Federal Communications Commission added foreign-produced mobile robots, including humanoids, to its Covered List, blocking new models from U.S. authorization on national security grounds. The rule is “really like an import ban for national security,” says Chase Kaniecki, a Washington-based partner at Cleary Gottlieb who advises corporate clients on trade and national security. “China is the main driver,” he says, though the rule covers all foreign-origin humanoids. Companies sourcing robots or parts abroad will have to “onshore a lot of that supply chain in order for their products to qualify.” Enforcement details are “still a little uncertain,” he adds, though U.S. Customs and the FCC will coordinate. The risk is two humanoid industries on parallel tracks. In the play, the owners “don’t want them to form alliances or collectivity,” Zhulina says, “which they eventually still do.” In Act II, Domin proposes building each factory’s robots with a different language so they will “never be able to understand each other.” Zhulina sees “almost this reference to the Tower of Babel,” and a nod to a world where, after World War One, workers “started to identify by their nationality” instead of uniting. The scheme fails because the robots “work by our hands,” she says. That shared labor becomes their collectivity. The FCC’s rule sorts robots and parts the way Domin hoped to, by where they were made. Whether a border can keep two industries apart once the machines share a factory floor is the question the play leaves hanging. Each company’s math checks out; the aggregate’s may not The comparison has limits. Nothing in a Shenzhen showroom or a Fremont lab is drafting a manifesto. The obstacles are duller: proving reliability over a full shift, surviving a bubble shakeout Beijing itself has warned of, and clearing trade barriers. And with China facing a demographic labor shortage, robots there may fill a gap before they create a surplus, the International Federation of Robotics notes. Čapek needed an uprising to dramatize obsolescence; today a line item will do. Each company’s math checks out. The error appears only in aggregate, where a wage booked as a cost on one ledger is income, and demand, on another. Economists still dispute how much of that lost income automation wins back through cheaper goods and new kinds of work. Groshen sees new jobs coming from three directions, a framework she applies to transformative technology waves like AI or humanoid robots: “the ones who supply AI, the ones who adopt AI, and the ones who have nothing to do with AI.” (For humanoids, read “AI” as “robots.”) As prices fall, consumers buy more from the adopters and have “more money left over to buy” everything else. But “there are gaps that can hinder the adjustment,” she says: timing, geography, skills, and whether workers have a voice in the process. That voice, she says, “sometimes … comes from a union.” Čapek didn’t end his play with the uprising. In the epilogue, the last human alive, Alquist, sends two robots who have learned to love each other out into the world as a new Adam and Eve. Čapek had to end the world to make his point, but we don’t have to. This story was originally featured on Fortune.com ...read more read less