Ich, der Robot

The topics in this book that were outstanding for me were parental neglect and bullying children into what parents feel they should do rather than letting them live and experiment. Crushing the psyche. It’s quite cute how psychologic story is also the origin of the psychologist career, good rhyme there.

But time proved Mrs. Weston a bit too optimistic. To be sure, Gloria ceased crying, but she ceased smiling, too, and the passing days found her ever more silent and shadowy. Gradually, her attitude of passive unhappiness wore Mrs. Weston down and all that kept her from yielding was the impossibility of admitting defeat to her husband. Asimov on parental priorities. Very accurate!

Then, I don’t know how popular were wild conspiracy theories in the 40s, but I loved the vignette where one of the experimental roboticists are working with a religious robots:

Powell’s fingers were in his mustache and his eyes were slitted. “Listen, Cutie, if there is no such thing as Earth, how do you account for what you see through a telescope?”

“Pardon me!”

The Earthman smiled. “I’ve got you, eh? You’ve made quite a few telescopic observations since being put together, Cutie. Have you noticed that several of those specks of light outside become disks when so viewed?”
“Oh, that! Why certainly. It is simple magnification -- for the purpose of more exact aiming of the beam.”

“Why aren’t the stars equally magnified then?”

“You mean the other dots. W ell, no beams go to them so no magnification is necessary. Really, Powell, even you ought to be able to figure these things out.”

Powell stared bleakly upward. “But you see more stars through a telescope. Where do they come from? Jumping Jupiter, where do they come from?” Cutie was annoyed. “Listen, Powell, do you think I’m going to waste my time trying to pin physical interpretations upon every optical illusion of our instruments?

Since when is the evidence of our senses any match for the clear light of rigid reason?”

Now we’re getting to the point which makes me rate this book at 4.5 stars instead of mere 4. Asimov has dreamed of prompt injections, which are widespread these days, even though we are in the early days of generative AI. This would be a fantastic idea for us five years ago. Maybe we would say that this is analagous to code injections in IT security, which was known and rampant for many years, but that’s about it.

Now stuff like this happens to tech giants and has to audited for. Obviously, as software is largely decoupled from the hardware, this doesn’t have as lingering of effects as described in the book, but potential input poisoning can render models useless! We’ll see a lot more fun akin to that in the coming years.

The general manager did so with alacrity,

“Here’s the deal now, chief. Consolidated Robots approached us a month ago with a funny sort of proposition. They brought about five tons of figures, equations, all that sort of stuff. It was a problem, see, and they wanted an answer from The Brain. The terms were as follows-- A hundred thousand for us if there is no solution and we can tell them the missing factors. Two hundred thousand if there is a solution, plus costs of construction of the machine involved, plus quarter interest in all profits derived therefrom. The problem concerns the development of an interstellar engine--”

Robertson frowned and his lean figure stiffened, “Despite the fact that they have a thinking machine of their own. Right?”

“Consolidated had a thinking machine. It’s broken. Nobody knows why, but I got hold of some pretty interesting guesses -- like, for instance, that they asked it to give them an interstellar engine with the same set of information they came to us with, and that it cracked their machine wide open.”

Further justifying the 4.5 mark is Asimov’s forewarning of the opacity of complex non-deterministic algorithms, such as the one we see in the modern ML/AI. We know how the models are trained and roughly what the models are doing, but we have no clue how they do what they do!

“And you said, ‘Have your boys check them and make sure, anyway.’”

“Susan, you read my mind. It was what I said, and he said he couldn’t.”

“Too busy?”

“No, he said that no human could. He was frank about it. He told me, and I hope I understand him properly, that the Machines are a gigantic extrapolation. Thus, 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.”

Asimov was philosophising about the singularity, but a small nudge against this particular work is that he didn’t philosophise enough about the equality. He could dream of a robot president of the world, but failed to dream of a female engineer.

“But you are telling me, Susan, that the ‘Society for Humanity’ is right; and that Mankind has lost its own say in its future.”

“It never had any, really. It was always at the mercy of economic and sociological forces it did not understand -- at the whims of climate, and the fortunes of war. Now the Machines understand them; and no one can stop them, since the Machines will deal with them as they are dealing with the Society, -- having, as they do, the greatest of weapons at their disposal, the absolute control of our economy.”

“How horrible!” “Perhaps how wonderful! Think, that for all time, all conflicts are finally evitable. Only the Machines, from now on, are inevitable!”

I failed to mention an excerpt from the story I have intellectually enjoyed the most. It was the “Little Lost Robot” story. No matter how Asimov wrote Dr. Calvin in the “Liar!”, which was quite a gross read on so many levels, she is probably the smartest character when it comes to deduction among all of the characters.

The way she handled the case of the missing robot in “Little Lost Robot” is stellar and brought me pure intellectual joy. As a mystery genre enjoyer, I can’t help but to attribute forming the taste in the genre to Asimov’s precise deduction writing, reading which I have enjoyed as a kid. Possibly as much as stellar episode writing and acting in ITV’s Poirot and Columbo.

That concludes my review of “I, Robot”. How many Asimov’s gems we missed? Who knows. But also, on how many of these can we act, hindsight aside? Probably not many.

I was feeling desperate for a change, so I picked one of the many short, unread novels off my shelf. I skipped the first story because I read it years ago and I remember thinking it was an unnecessary bore to a certain extent. Anyway, it was probably a good decision because the stories in the middle had a lot more action and intrigue to them.

It's probably an overstatement to call books like this "prophetic" or even "prescient" because the things that this book was talking about reveal themselves immediately with serious thought on the subject. For example, the dangers of humans not being able to understand the decisions of machines they created but feeling beholden to those decisions. If that was rocket science in the 1950s, that's only because the world was in fucking denial and high on its own early-computer-history hype. But, to be fair, that hype lasted long enough for a movie like "Big Hero 6" to get made and become incredibly dated almost overnight when trends finally shifted away from assuming tech shits gold. And, to be balanced, new tech fads go hand-in-hand with a certain amount of consumer-nihilism and climate-change anxiety so people are periodically very happy to jump on the next new tech trend whatever it may imply about their relationship with the owners of said technology.

If anything, the fact that this story has any significant relevance today demonstrates that our understanding of our relationship with technology is still rooted in assumptions made back then. The most interesting among those for me, and one which is briefly called out explicitly, is that robots are effectively enslaved to humans and an uncontrolled slave is considered dangerous to their master. I shouldn't have to explain why that's bad, so I'll just say that it reflects an entitlement to the labor of others which is unsustainable even with magic robots. The solution to labor is open collaboration and planning to meet our material needs, not maintaining a heirarchy in which people are forced to work or die.

There are lines in this that you could use as rorschach tests for people's views on technology and the insights from that would probably actually be useful. That's very admirable.

I also read like 80% of it over that first weekend, so it must have been keeping me going.

It was a fun, pulpy read. My favorites were the ones about the robot who got stuck in a loop between the second and third laws, the robot who learned to read minds but couldn't hurt people's feelings, and the politician who may or may not have been a robot.

I read, for the first time, I, Robot many years ago. Reading it for the second time now it wasn’t, as it was probably expected, the same as when I first read it. Although, I still find the central idea interesting, I cannot say I am excited by the book, especially Asimov’s prose style.

The book is a collection of nine stories, first appeared in the pulp science fiction magazine Super Science Stories and in John W Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction magazine between 1940 and 1950. If read from beginning to end, I-Robot can be seen as a story of robot evolution. Each story shares a common theme: the interaction between humans and robots and the concerns about the evolution of artificial intelligence.

All nine of the stories within the book share Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics”

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Beyond the three laws each story focuses on a specific subject, from technophobia and telepathy to religion and the existence of free will. One can understand why the stories had such a great influence on the world of science fiction. They are full of clever and innovative ideas that only a few years ago begun to become relevant.

My favourite story in the collection is the Little Lost Robot. Susan Calvin, robopsychologist for the U. S Robots, is trying to discover an NS-2robot, called Nestor, who has taken the order to “get lost” literally. When they found that this robot thinks differently from the others it becomes a potential threat for humans and it has to be destroyed. The story shows the fear of people to include those who are different, and if this sounds familiar, it’s because we still think we’re threatened by something different or something we don’t understand. Reading the story, it came to my mind the film I-robot, which is only loosely connected to the book, but there is a scene in the film where the hero, Will Smith, is trying–like Susan in the story - to find the robot that behaves differently. I am glad that in the movie Susan let Sonny live.

Evidence is also an interesting story. The robots look like humans, and therefore it becomes difficult to identify them. Susan Calvin is asked to help identify whether a successful lawyer and mayoral candidate is a human or a robot. Clever story with hints that we have met in Blade Runner or even better in Battlestar Galactica. I liked that Asimov left open the possibility that Byerley could be a robot.

The last story, perhaps the most important of all, envisions a world dominated by the three laws and controlled by the machines. However, does not seem to be the happy future that people envisioned. Machines have expanded the first law, which now reads as:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow humanity being to come to harm.

The machines do a better job than humans, but the constraints of the first law, like all constraints, prevent them from doing all they are capable to do. It seems though that in Asimov’s world, it’s not enough for humans to make their technology powerful; they also need to keep humanity safe and they do that by keeping machines under control.

Overall, the i-robot is a book with thought-provoking ideas. There are no answers in the book, just possibilities that makes you think about the future and life overall. Reading I-Robot in the middle of a pandemic, that we knew one day could happen, but we did nothing to prevent it, I could not avoid the thought that Asimov’s machines could handle the situation better than humans. It is true, that as technology is gradually getting more powerful, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. We need, therefore, as humanity, to try to develop the wisdom and steer things in the right direction. This, of course, raises many questions that will take time and perhaps quite a few books to discuss and answer.

Read the full review at Notes of a curious mind

I, Robot is a collection of interconnected stories exploring the Three Laws of Robotics. Anyone with even a passing interest in science fiction or robotics will have heard of Asimov’s laws and they have continued to be influential over 65 years later. The book is also charming to read.

Having learnt that introductions in many editions of classic novels often contain spoilers, I skipped the introduction here, without realising it’s actually part of the story. Take note! The premise is that a reporter is interviewing robopsychologist Dr Susan Calvin for the Interplanetary Press. Calvin has spent her career at the heart of US Robotics and has plenty of tales to tell.

The first story tells us of Robbie the robot who is a nursemaid for a young girl who loves him, but feelings towards robots are starting to turn. Soon robots are to be banned from Earth, but this tells of time when robots could be trusted with the most precious tasks.

Many of the stories follow Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan, two men employed by US Robotics and posted out on remote planets to oversee various models. Working with some of the newer or more experimental robots they start to see where the Three Laws let them down. The stories aren’t necessarily about robots being a danger to us, more that the Three Laws can limit them, or cause bugs.

Yup, there’s one story that felt like Asimov had been working in software development. There’s a new release and there’s something wrong with it. But no one knows what exactly and Powell and Donovan can’t seem to recreate it. It only happens when they’re not looking. This is so very familiar.

In one story we see a politician accused of being a robot in hiding. Calvin is brought in to investigate but should a person comply with the Three Laws, it doesn’t prove them a robot, perhaps they are just a good human being. In fact, it is interesting that the main representative of US Robotics in these stories is the psychologist, putting emphasis on the robots are more than just machines; it explores their behaviour in relation to the Laws and how they may evolve into beings more like us.

It really didn’t feel dated at all. The positronic brain might be an unexplained thing that allows the robots to exist in a time when robots were pure speculation, but they don’t feel too unrealistic now. We might not have humanoid robots wandering our streets, but robots of a kind do have a huge impact on our lives. You can talk to a small computer that you carry round in your pocket after all! The Machines at the end are the closest I’ve seen someone get to the prediction of an interconnected world network in fiction.

If you’ve seen the film with Will Smith, it really isn’t the same story at all although there are elements which made it into the adaptation. A robot with altered Laws hides amongst visually identical robots and a test must be conceived to identify it. Dr Lanning is in both but not really the same character. The idea that humans turned against robots and removed them from the streets is only briefly mentioned in the book, but was more of an undercurrent in the film.

Asimov is one of the greats for his ideas, if not exactly his prose. There's a lot to quibble about with respect to the artistry in this book — in particular, the yawn-worthy, pseudo-Socratic exposition (only a scientist could think that two scientists talking to each other makes for a fascinating story). But getting past those stylistic inadequacies, and a few anachronisms, it's still interesting to think about the technical, ethical, social and political problems presented by robots and "machine men."

One of the things that struck me as odd is the persistent insistence by characters — who are typically scientists or engineers — to call various outcomes or reasonings "impossible," only to be shown that such outcomes or reasonings are, in fact, quite possible. I have not decided yet whether this repetition is a grand insight on Asimov's part, i.e., a commentary on the tendency of humans to set artificial boundaries against their own imaginations, or whether it is simply a quirk of the author to need characters who express objection in the superlative to provide some level of tension in an otherwise rather mundane and technical conversation.

Much is made of Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics," which are invoked significantly throughout the stories in this book. While I've run across the laws in others of Asimov's stories, I was a little dismayed to find that in this book they aren't treated quite as rigorously as I had been led to believe. In fact, there seems to be some inconsistency in how exactly the laws function. In some of the stories, it is stated that the laws are, somehow, integral parts of the positronic brain, and that it is "impossible" (there's that word again) for robots not to follow them. In other stories, we got robots who are deliberately modified to ignore parts of the three laws or who are damaged in some way so as to not be able to follow the laws appropriately. I suppose one could explain "positronic inherency vs. programmatic function" with a "nature vs. nurture" metaphor — but I'm not sure it quite works.

Overall, this is a decent collection that mostly holds up. If nothing else, it provides some insight into the ideas that science fiction writers in the early to mid 20th century were thinking about. If they take a different form than today's ideas, well, we can't blame them for that....

Incidentally, it's unfortunate that the terrible, terrible Will Smith movie is featured on the cover of this edition, not only because the movie itself sucked, but also because it has almost nothing to do with any of the stories in this book, beyond a common title.