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.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I think you are mostly right. In some of Asimov's story, a robot occasionally appears to be breaking one of the rules, but upon further investigation this proves to be not so--there's just some factor that was non-obvious to the average human.

And I was really hoping that this was so for the first half of this trailer. But unless it's fooling me (and I have a shred of hope that it is), then the movie casts USRobotics as an evil corporation out to take over the world with its devastating robot army (in the mode of "Starbucks initiates 'phase two' of operations"). Sob

Asimov's story

Oops. Should be stories.

Yup... I maintain that one of the most tragic figures in modern literature is the Asimovian robot who thinks it has helped kill someone.

At least this is a fun discussion subject. :) And no doubt kids'll go read the book because of this movie... though it'll be weird to see the next printing with the unavoidable movie tie-in jacket artwork, and text inside that has only a surface resemblance to the movie's story. (And I'm talking as if that's never happened before, ha.)