70 Years Ago: I, Robot
Today in 1950, Isaac Asimov published one of the most influential science fiction novels of all time
By the time I, Robot was published 70 years ago today, Isaac Asimov had already released all nine of its chapters as individual short stories in popular science fiction magazines of the day. Each story was distinct, with some overlapping characters, but Asimov stitched them together and wrote an introduction that framed it as a coherent work. Literary scholars — a profession that relishes jargon like no other — actually have a name for this type of work. A fix-up novel, they call it. (The rate at which this profession can produce clumsy jargon is astounding.)
If pasting together stories sounds hacky to your purist ears, like seeing a band play their greatest hits as a medley, it’s worth noting the predominance of the practice. Contemporary genre fiction is rife with fix-ups, and most early works of classic literature could reasonably be classified as such, from The Odyssey to Le Morte d'Arthur to Arabian Nights. The Bible is the quintessential fix-up. Who’s the hack now?
Anyway, several of the stories in I, Robot would later be adapted for television, and of course there was the Will Smith movie. But one of the stories, “Runaround,” could arguably be called the most important science fiction short story of all time. It proposed the Three Laws of Robots:
First Law. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly in the fields of driverless cars and facial recognition, have made the Three Laws more relevant than ever. But one could argue the Laws have played a larger role in popular culture than robotics. A very thorough wikipedia page has compiled uses of The Three Laws of Robotics in popular culture, from RoboCop to Repo Man, but it somehow overlooked this xkcd, which imagines what would happen if we rearranged the order of the laws:
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