Robot Dreams

Pretty enjoyable, but I profess the Three Laws makes me laugh a bit. "Removal of the first law would mean no non-imaginary solutions to the positronic field equations!" - Little Lost Robot. Total psuedobabble composed out of things that, at first glance, sound like legitimate science. One could compose field equations for positrons, and try to alter them to take out any real solutions - in fact, one should have only real solutions because we only see real numbers in the everyday world. So one in practice, one would end up with no solutions at all as the imaginary ones wouldn't be terribly valid. Not too bad, so far: one could definitely imagine your machine becoming very unusable if it had no valid solutions coming out of its calculations. If you wanted to make it merely unstable instead of totally unusable though like in the plot, it would be better to have just /some/ of the calculations come out bugged and lead to a computer crash, because if there are no solutions to any of its calculations it shouldn't be unstable but just stall and crash.
(Actually, on reading further, it's clear that's what they do: the First Law wasn't removed completely in this case. So again, not bad for made up science babble.)
Relating this to a consciousness not wanting to murder humans, however, this all seems very silly, seeming to imply that this has something to do with imaginary numbers as an odd number or power of those will leave you with an imaginary solution instead of a real one, and that one could not somehow substitute this with some other imaginary entity/law to combine with the left over imaginary part to make a real.
"All conscious life resents domination."
Why? How can you be sure there are no 'black swans'? These kinds of absolute statements are some of the things that bug me about older fiction; they seem more likely to appear in them, for whatever reason.