Passage 1
But a working machine must not play the piano, must not feel happy, must not do a whole lot of other things. A gasoline motor must not have tassels or ornaments, Miss Glory. And to manufacture artificial workers is the same thing as the manufacture of a gasoline motor. The process must be the simplest, and the product the best from a practical point of view. The one that is the cheapest. The one whose requirements are the smallest. Young Rossum invented a worker with the minimum amount of requirements. He had to simplify him. He rejected everything that did not contribute directly to the progress of work. Everything that makes man more expensive. In fact he rejected man and made the Robot. My dear Miss Glory, the Robots are not people. Mechanically they are more perfect than we are; they have an enormously developed intelligence, but they have no soul.
Tools and agentsMachine minds and made personsLabour and mechanizationinstrument · advanceslimited servant · advancesmeaning and understanding · considersEconomic and material powerMeaning, experience, and interpretationConditional or mixedIndividualInstitutionalMachine or artificial systemWork and economic order
Domin defines artificial workers through economic simplification, separating technical intelligence from personhood and making person-like capacities a production cost.
Act I, Domin explains the design of the Robot