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Robopsychology, seventy years later
Dec. 28th, 2022 01:41 pmI’m not a very good sci-fi fan so, while I was familiar with Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, I’d never actually read I, Robot. But now I have!
The weirdest thing about the copy of I, Robot that I borrowed is the cover, which the movie tie-in cover to a movie of the same title that is, apparently, an action movie starring Will Smith. I cannot imagine what on Earth it has to do with the stories told in I, Robot the book, which is a series of short stories threaded together by a framing device of a journalist interviewing a robopsychologist named Dr. Susan Calvin about stuff that happened over the course of several decades. The movie tagline that graces the front cover is “One man saw it coming.” Who is the man? What did he see coming? The book offers absolutely no answers on this point, as the only character who constitutes any sort of actual throughline in the various vignettes is Dr. Calvin, whomst is not a man and is also pretty pro-robot. The stories themselves are all about various robot dilemmas that nobody at all saw coming.
The short stories all essentially function the same way: Using the robots, and the Three Laws of Robotics, as a framework to explore various logical and ethical questions. The Three Laws of Robotics, as Dr. Calvin in explains in the second-to-last story (for any reader too dim to have noticed it already), are also basically the normal principles of most halfway decent human ethical systems. Unlike humans, when robots find themselves stuck in an ethical dilemma, they don’t generally just pretend they haven’t, pick the course of action they like best/think is easiest, and commit to it–they tend to go on the fritz in highly noticeable and baffling ways. The human characters then have to figure out what the dilemma is and how to solve it in order to de-upfuck the robot.
Many of these robot shenanigans are quite funny, which is important because otherwise the stories would be entirely too serious, as they mostly consist of highly credentialed scientists talking through long chains of carefully explicit reasoning. The human characters are generally a bit thin (as is unsurprising in a short story) but they tend to have enough tics to remember who is who, and some of them are also fairly entertaining, or at least have amusingly petty dynamics with each other. The banter between Mike Donovan and Greg Powell, two coworkers who tend to land working all the most cursed jobs together, is pretty solid. The robots, of course, are bugfuck nuts: One of them becomes a religious zealot; one of them winds up directing his underlings to dance and then can’t remember why later; one of them builds an interstellar ship and fills its FTL-jump time with weird audio pranks. I enjoyed these shenanigans quite a lot.
There are a lot of ways in which this book has a very midcentury vibe, but overall it’s aged a lot better than quite a lot of sci-fi from the ‘50s has, and it’s definitely a foundational text for the genre, so it’s well worth reading.
The weirdest thing about the copy of I, Robot that I borrowed is the cover, which the movie tie-in cover to a movie of the same title that is, apparently, an action movie starring Will Smith. I cannot imagine what on Earth it has to do with the stories told in I, Robot the book, which is a series of short stories threaded together by a framing device of a journalist interviewing a robopsychologist named Dr. Susan Calvin about stuff that happened over the course of several decades. The movie tagline that graces the front cover is “One man saw it coming.” Who is the man? What did he see coming? The book offers absolutely no answers on this point, as the only character who constitutes any sort of actual throughline in the various vignettes is Dr. Calvin, whomst is not a man and is also pretty pro-robot. The stories themselves are all about various robot dilemmas that nobody at all saw coming.
The short stories all essentially function the same way: Using the robots, and the Three Laws of Robotics, as a framework to explore various logical and ethical questions. The Three Laws of Robotics, as Dr. Calvin in explains in the second-to-last story (for any reader too dim to have noticed it already), are also basically the normal principles of most halfway decent human ethical systems. Unlike humans, when robots find themselves stuck in an ethical dilemma, they don’t generally just pretend they haven’t, pick the course of action they like best/think is easiest, and commit to it–they tend to go on the fritz in highly noticeable and baffling ways. The human characters then have to figure out what the dilemma is and how to solve it in order to de-upfuck the robot.
Many of these robot shenanigans are quite funny, which is important because otherwise the stories would be entirely too serious, as they mostly consist of highly credentialed scientists talking through long chains of carefully explicit reasoning. The human characters are generally a bit thin (as is unsurprising in a short story) but they tend to have enough tics to remember who is who, and some of them are also fairly entertaining, or at least have amusingly petty dynamics with each other. The banter between Mike Donovan and Greg Powell, two coworkers who tend to land working all the most cursed jobs together, is pretty solid. The robots, of course, are bugfuck nuts: One of them becomes a religious zealot; one of them winds up directing his underlings to dance and then can’t remember why later; one of them builds an interstellar ship and fills its FTL-jump time with weird audio pranks. I enjoyed these shenanigans quite a lot.
There are a lot of ways in which this book has a very midcentury vibe, but overall it’s aged a lot better than quite a lot of sci-fi from the ‘50s has, and it’s definitely a foundational text for the genre, so it’s well worth reading.