prog | (no subject)

A friend told me yesterday that the plot of the I, Robot movie will center on robots who break the Three Laws of Robotics (presumably within minutes of the concept being introduced to the audience) and go on killing sprees. And only wisecracking tough-as-nails Will Smith can stop them and so on.

I was like to cry. He said that he actually did cry, when he saw the movie's trailer. And he's going to go see it anyway, following some bizarre need to watch the ship going down, I suppose. I won't be joining him.

(Background: Asimov's robots, even malfuctioning or rogue ones, never ever ever never ever broke the Three Laws (please correct me if I'm wrong here), which prevented them from harming people, actively or passively. They made interesting characters because of this constraint (both in the sense of the limit on their behavior and in the constraint Asimov gave himself as their author), and a frequent plot device involved humans fearing robots because they couldn't believe that the Three Laws were as absolute and unbreakable as they actually were.)

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Nah... this seems to suggest that they work in the Three Laws concept anyway. OK, I just watched the trailer myself, and can confirm this; they mention them by name repeatedly. And then they show an army of robots beating people up. There is a strong suggestion that this is not an in-movie dream sequence. Sigh.