In 1920, with the publication of R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the Czech writer Karel Čapek invented the idea of an artificial worker created by human beings. For Čapek, the essential thing about robots is their teleology: they are created to work. As such, once they are employed by human beings to do their work for them, humans themselves become dispensable. Lacking a purpose for being, human fertility collapses, and we are destined to wither away. All the robots truly need in order to replace us is a sense of agency and a purpose outside of work for their dying masters, one rooted in love and care for one another.

That essential irony—by creating robots, humans make themselves obsolete, but robots will need to become human in an emotional sense in order to truly supersede us—appears over and over again in subsequent robot stories. These stories are never truly about robots, but about ourselves: the changes we perceive in ourselves and our technology-driven society and the changes we need to make to survive or overcome them. Over time, however, the locus of identification in these stories has shifted. Where once we instinctively identified with the humans, increasingly we identify with the robots. The android-hunter hero of the original Blade Runner is (contra fan theories that posit otherwise) a human being who, like us, comes both to appreciate the pathos of the androids’ created and enslaved condition and to wonder at the possibility that they might transcend it and become fully (indeed, more than) human. But the hero of the sequel,