Tuesday, December 23, 2025

Synchronicity, Čapek's R.U.R. and Guido van Rossum of Python fame

I am a physicalist, so I don't believe in synchronicity. Nonetheless, a connection that has not escaped my poetic/symbolic attention is between Čapek's Rossum's Universal Robots and the name Guido van Rossum, the author of Python. Čapek's Rossum is an alusion (or the like) to Czech rozum, reason, I think. (Recall Čapek's word play in the putatively Dutch name van Toch, which was derived from Czech Vantoch.) And Python is being used as a glue language for artificial intelligence, a component of what may become Musk's universal robot. It is as if Coelho was right and things were written by one hand. These thoughts are testimony to a human desire to interpret things symbolically and to search for hidden connections (meanings?). This desire is satiated e.g. by astrology.

More symbolic interpretations are possible. Python the programming language appears to be named after a snake, although it is in fact named by a British comic troupe. And thus, there may be a connection between snake as a symbol and the AGI and robots. Quite possibly, robots and AGI are works of a snake, that is, per the Bible, the devil.

(A question: should I spell the name as Capek to make it easier on the Anglophone readers, or Čapek, to use the correct Czech spelling? The latter provides a hint that "Č" is perhaps not to be pronounced as "C". I must have heard English pronunciation "Kapek", while the Czech one is closer to Chapek, starting with IPA tʃ. Britannica online uses "Čapek". Answer: I went for Čapek.)

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