Not I, Robot

I'll probably go see the upcoming I, Robot movie. I might even enjoy it, as it looks like a well-made action-packed hardware-filled special-effects film... a dick flick. But to enjoy it, I'm going to have to close my eyes for the brief bit during the opening credits where it says that it's based on the book by Isaac Asimov. It's not.

OK, technically it's based on Asimov's "Robot" stories, as it uses some of the world created by him for them. In particular, it refers to his legendary Three Laws of Robotics, which require any robot to (in order of descending priority): protect humans, obey orders, and preserve themselves. The cast credits indicate that Dr. Susan Calvin (the narrator of the book) is in it. And based on the previews, it looks like they've lifted a plot point or two from the original book. But the revolution-of-the-robots action-fest at the end of the preview clearly tosses the Three Laws out the window.

Asimov - who was not just a writer, but a scientist - crafted the Three Laws first as a kind of intellectual exercise, mapping out what sort of rules we'd have to program robots with for them to function in human society. From there he used them as the premise for a series of stories that tested the limits of these rules. Some of the best of these were of the "locked room murder mystery" sort, wherein we're faced with a seemingly impossible situation (instead of a man stabbed to death alone in a room locked from the inside, we'd have a robot who appeared to have violated the Second Law by refusing to carry out an order) and one of the characters - and the reader - has to figure out what really happened.

The difference is that Asimov stuck to those Three Laws. Even in one instance (in a later novel) where a robot clearly and willfully did kill a human, Asimov managed to find a way to get that to fit into the Three Laws paradigm. But there's no way that even Asimov himself (aided by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking) could manage that with the robots-on-the-rampage mayhem already shown in the movie trailers.

When Asimov called them "laws" he was thinking in the scientific sense of "laws of physics". You might find odd circumstances where they don't apply like you'd expect, and you may even have to expand on them when new situations arise. But you can't simply "break" them. The screenwriter of this film seems to be thinking of "laws" in the political sense of "laws and regulations"... and wouldn't it be scary if suddenly robots no longer followed those rules?

That's an interesting question to explore, and it could certainly qualify as good science fiction, of the "cautionary tale" sort. But it's not what I, Robot the book is about. It's a cautionary tale of sorts itself, but a completely different one, in which robots don't take over by force or deception, but take over (in a manner of speaking) by our own abdication of independence. It's really more of a fascinating historical puzzle... which admittedly probably wouldn't put as many butts in the seats over the summer.

Like I said, I'll probably see the movie. But first I've pulled out my old paperback copy of the book, and I'm going to give it another read through. I recommend it highly. It's a fairly short book, and it's broken up into chapters which you can easily read one at a time (each one is actually a short story that fits into a larger framework). The chapters were written in the 1940's, so some of the projected dates and details are off (an early "nursemaid" robot in 1996), but it should hold up pretty well regardless, on the strength of its ideas. I, Robot also served as a springboard for a handful of full-length novels. They take longer to digest than a flick of Will Smith battling CGI 'bots, but they're worth it.