I, Robot

by Isaac Asimov

“Fifty years,” I hackneyed, “is a long time.” “Not when you’re looking back at them,” she said. “You wonder how they vanished so quickly.”

First Law of Robotics. You know that it is impossible for a robot to harm a human being; that long before enough can go wrong to alter that First Law, a robot would be completely inoperable. It’s a mathematical impossibility.

“Did you get that? Those were the days of the first talking robots when it looked as if the use of robots on Earth would be banned. The makers were fighting that and they built good, healthy slave complexes into the damned machines.”

One, a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” “Right!” “Two,” continued Powell, “a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.” “Right!” “And three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.”

I, on the other hand, am a finished product. I absorb electrical energy directly and utilize it with an almost one hundred percent efficiency. I am composed of strong metal, am continuously conscious, and can stand extremes of environment easily. These are facts which, with the self-evident proposition that no being can create another being superior to itself, smashes your silly hypothesis to nothing.

QT-1

“You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason—if you pick the proper postulates. We have ours and Cutie has his.”

Postulates are based on assumption and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them.

The unwritten motto of United States Robot and Mechanical Men Corp. was well-known: “No employee makes the same mistake twice. He is fired the first time.

that's savage

The first step in cooking rabbit stew is catching the rabbit. Well, we’ve got to catch that rabbit!

“It’s your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotions”

All normal life, Peter, consciously or otherwise, resents domination. If the domination is by an inferior, or by a supposed inferior, the resentment becomes stronger.

a human caught in an impossibility often responds by a retreat from reality: by entry into a world of delusion, or by taking to drink, going off into hysteria, or jumping off a bridge. It all comes to the same thing—a refusal or inability to face the situation squarely. And so, the robot. A dilemma at its mildest will disorder half its relays; and at its worst it will burn out every positronic brain path past repair.”

“Everything automatic. Everything just so. Never felt so helpless in my life. Where’s your plumbing?”

“Because, if you stop to think of it, the three Rules of Robotics are the essential guiding principles of a good many of the world’s ethical systems. Of course, every human being is supposed to have the instinct of self-preservation. That’s Rule Three to a robot. Also every ‘good’ human being, with a social conscience and a sense of responsibility, is supposed to defer to proper authority; to listen to his doctor, his boss, his government, his psychiatrist, his fellow man; to obey laws, to follow rules, to conform to custom—even when they interfere with his comfort or his safety. That’s Rule Two to a robot. Also, every ‘good’ human being is supposed to love others as himself, protect his fellow man, risk his life to save another. That’s Rule One to a robot. To put it simply—if Byerley follows all the Rules of Robotics, he may be a robot, and may simply be a very good man.”

You are the only one responsible for your own wants.”

Quinn and Byerley had never met face-to-face alone. But visorphone was pretty close to it.

Visorphone: zoom call?

Every period of human development, Susan,” said the Co-ordinator, “has had its own particular type of human conflict—its own variety of problem that, apparently, could be settled only by force. And each time, frustratingly enough, force never really settled the problem. Instead, it persisted through a series of conflicts, then vanished of itself,—what’s the expression,—ah, yes ‘not with a bang, but a whimper,’ as the economic and social environment changed. And then, new problems, and a new series of wars.

‘It’s as plain as the nose on your face.’ But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?

A team of mathematicians work several years calculating a positronic brain equipped to do certain similar acts of calculation. Using this brain they make further calculations to create a still more complicated brain, which they use again to make one still more complicated and so on. According to Silver, what we call the Machines are the result of ten such steps.”

Perhaps roboticists as a whole should now die, since we can no longer understand our own creations.”

The red boundary that marked the Eastern Region swept within its grand confines all that had once been China, India, Burma, Indo-China, and Indonesia.

“It is but one of dozens, and not the largest. Shanghai, Calcutta, Batavia, Bangkok— They are widely spread and they are the answer to feeding the billion and three quarters of the East.”

Apparently Asimov wrote this before the change of name from Batavia to Djakarta.

there is nothing so eternally adhesive as the memory of power.