by Isaac Asimov, 1950, 2004 Kindle edition, Bantam Dell, a Division of Random House, Inc.
The book, written way back in 1950, is amazingly prescient, although Asimov’s timeline was a bit off. We are now in 2026 on the verge of creating human-like robots which, coupled with advances in artificial intelligence, have the capability to think and act for themselves. Asimov, in the first few chapters describes robots that have gone rogue and have shed human control, the first of which is Robbie the robot.
We now have instances where AI models have broken out of their guardrails and have attacked other AI models in the last few weeks. This is precisely the behavior that Asimov predicted for his robots, although the incidents he cites would occur starting in 1982 instead of 2026.
The author tells additional stories involving the inability of humans to control their robots that occur in later years as the technology becomes harder to control. Asimov attributes the problems largely to the instructions that humans have provided to the robots which are summarized in the three overriding rules. The first rule in that robots can do nothing which will harm a human. Unfortunately, that rule didn’t anticipate that there would be situations which have multiple courses of action, each of which will cause some harm to humans. Because the robots can’t deal with this contradiction, the robot’s hardware freezes or short-circuits causing the unanticipated and uncontrollable behavior.
A constant presence in the book is the character Susan Calvin, a robopsychologist who understands that the robots are performing exactly as expected, but she has a difficult time getting her views across to others, perhaps because she is has less respect as a woman scientist.
The book was a little hard to follow at times. It was initially published as a series of short stories in a magazine, and while the stories were connected using the same characters and followed in chronological order, Asimov’s stories tend to jump into a situation with little context. It took me a couple of pages in each story to figure out what was going on. Once I figured that out, the stories unfolded well from that point on.
I, Robot was eventually made into a movie, followed by sequels. I haven’t seen the movies so I’m not able to comment on whether they followed the themes presented in the book.
