- Publisher Random House Audio
- Date June 2004
- Binding CD: Audiobook
- Edition Unabridged
- ISBN 9780739312704
- Author Isaac Asimov
- Read by: Scott Brick
i, Robot by Isaac Asimov is one of those classic science fiction stories that I kind of remember reading a long time ago. I am glad I decided to reread this one. The novel is a series of stories about different robots with different technical capabilities and the ‘problems’ that occur in human interactions with these robots. The overall scenario is that a reporter is interviewing a renowned robot-psychologist at the time of her retirement and she is telling him these stories as examples of the development of robots over time.
Everyone probably knows the three rules of robotics from this and other Asimov books:
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm
- A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
How these rules, and the conflicts between them, are interpreted by the robots involved is usually the source of the robots’ and humans’ issues and the problems that need to be solved by the humans. It occurs to me that the book is more about humans and the human psychology represented by the robots. There are also some fun logic problems as the various humans try to figure out what may have gone wrong with some of the robots and how to deal with them.
The robots can also represent some of the archetypes of human behavior: the self-sacrificing helper, the religiously obsessed, the know-it-all who can’t believe anything they have not already figured out, the ‘yes-man’ saying just what people want to hear, etc. I think this may be the most interesting aspect of the novel, the thinking about how the robots represent human psychology and human behavior.
For a book written in 1950, this book is remarkably fresh and relevant. For the most part, the stories do not seem dated, like many old stories. The thoughts about Artificial Intelligence and some of the possible perils and promise of the technologies seem very relevant today with the rise of ChatGPT and other AI’s making the headlines. I, human, highly recommend i, Robot.
(Note that the image is from the cover of the audio book that I listened to. It is a picture of the Will Smith movie that had virtually nothing to do with the book itself.)
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