A century-old play explains how old our fear is. The first time the word “robot” appears is in Rossum’s Universal Robots (RUR), by Karel Capek, premiered in Prague in 1921. The word comes from Czech and means “served labor.” (It is no coincidence that the recent and acclaimed animation The wild robot calls its main character “Rozzum 7134.”) In RUR, robots are indistinguishable from people, as fleshy, limbed, and doe-eyed as any baby, less a tin can and more the kind of android you’d find in Bladerunner, all created in factories for the purposes of servitude, working both in the fields and in the houses. That is, until it finally occurs to them to rebel, killing most of their creators in a mass uprising.

In RUR, the entire plot depends on whether their human designers or themselves could make more of these robots. It’s a child’s question. And now, looking back on this work, written in war-torn Europe, you realize that you are looking at Capek’s own world, polished for attention.

Our fears of technology reflect the world we live in, not the one that doesn’t yet exist. When a Czech writer sat down to write his screenplay more than 100 years ago, no one still understood how DNA worked. We knew that the fetus grew in the womb. We finally discovered that it was actually not like a plant (and sperm like a seed) as had been thought for centuries. When Capek devised a robot as a bundle of flesh – a person who would not qualify as a person, but who would be seen as such, a person who was supposed to be less capable of feeling, constructed and trapped within a life of work – Thinking like him It wasn’t that far outside the scientific imagination.

Even now, the full function of DNA remains remote. What just a decade ago we called “junk DNA” seems to fulfill mysterious functions at various times in our lives. Inevitably, there will be a time when our future self looks back, sees our current anxieties, and thinks it’s silly that we thought it would be so easy to manipulate a child’s genetic destiny.

Therefore, we fear a world of genetically modified babies that only a few could have, who live forever with little pain while others suffer and die young. We fear people who live forced by the bodies they have. And we fear that people who live in these conditions will seek revenge. The truth is that we fear ourselves and the ugliness that already exists in our world. As a woman living in the United States, you are likely to live two decades longer than a woman in Chad. Fearing IVF is a distraction. It’s a way to pretend that some future hell isn’t here.

Joy is in theaters starting November 15; Cat Bohannon is the author of Eve: how the female body fueled 200 million years of human evolution (Penguin, £12.99)