Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS), often called “killer robots,” are theoretically able to target and fire with neither human supervision nor interference. Their development corresponds to a widespread and inevitable trend of military robotization.

Feudalism was a set of legal and military customs in medieval Europe that flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries, which, broadly defined, was a system for structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.

The play begins in a factory that makes artificial people, made of synthetic organic matter, called "robots." Unlike the modern usage of the term, these creatures are closer to the modern idea of cyborgs or even clones, as they can be mistaken for humans and can think for themselves. They seem happy to work for humans, although that changes, and a hostile robot rebellion leads to the extinction of the human race.

Karel Čapek introduced and made popular the frequently used international word robot, which first appeared in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) in 1920. The word robot comes from the word robota, meaning literally "serf labor", and, figuratively, "drudgery" or "hard work" in modern Czech (in Slovak, Russian, Polish, archaic Czech and other Slavic languages the cognate word means simply "work", comparable to German arbeit, with the same meaning.).