First Law:

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

Second Law:

A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law:

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

So saith Isaac Asimov.

If you don't recognise the above, you're just going to have to face the fact that you may have a life.  Sorry, but you have absolutely no claim to geekdom whatsoever.

When I started writing this section, I reread Isaac Asimov's robot books and I learned a great lesson: What struck you as profound when you were fourteen may be utter tripe when you're in your forties.  I remember consuming all of Asimov's works that I could find as a teenager.  He wasn't my favourite author by a long chalk, but he was readable and I was fascinated by his ideas.  However, decades of reading and experience made revisiting his fiction an unpleasant time.  I had forgotten how Asimov's writings were so much schoolboy prose frozen in the adolescent vocabulary of '40s pulp, or how  he had no real command of the language-- or at least did not show any interest in polishing his prose.  I did recall his lack of visual sense, which made his stories rough going, and how he tended  to labouriously describe what could simply be shown.   Worst of all, Asimov had no real understanding of history, human motives, or character and would often have his stories revolving about some trend or phobia or drive that had as much basis in reality as my hopes of winning the Nobel Prize. 

His work was most emphatically not literature and his robot stories among the most so.  They weren't so much stories  as logic problems bundled up as fiction with some of Asimov's cod philosophy thrown in  for good measure.  That being said, one can't deny that the robot stories were a milestone in sci-fi writing and had a great influence on later writers and filmmakers to the point of practically acting as a template for future tales.

The way the story usually goes, before Isaac Asimov came along robots in the popular mind were, as a rule, Frankenstein monsters forever turning on their masters and wreaking all sorts of havoc on the countryside in an orgy of iron-clad evil.  Then, around 1940, John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, was getting a bit fed up with how science fiction had ended up in the same  hack rut as other pulp fiction.  Sci-fi in those days had, rightly, been dismissed as pot-boiler stories filled with one-dimensional cardboard characters, vast prairies of flat exposition, and hoary storylines stolen from other genres; especially westerns.*  Campbell began a policy of working closely with his more promising authors and grooming them in a style of writing that was a slice above that of bargain-basement pulp fiction.   By emphasising character, stronger storylines,  and attention to internal logic, he soon had a stable of writers who could produce readable prose.  More or less.  None of it was Kipling, but at least it was better than the rival hack work that violated the most basic rules of story telling. 

Campbell felt that the whole concept of the destructive robot turning on its creators and displacing humanity was nonsense.  He argued that robots were machines and as such, engineers would build them with safeguards to prevent them from harming or rebelling against their masters, much as we have handles on knives and automatic brakes on trains.  Asimov had already written a couple of stories about robots that were more or less along these lines and when Asimov submitted a story to Campbell about a telepathic robot that lied constantly because it didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings, Campbell called Asimov in to discuss the idea behind the story, and the result was the famous Three Laws of Robotics that get trucked out with baffling regularity.

*Unless ordered to do so by a duly constituted authority. (amended by Terry Pratchett)

**If you want to get a taste for what it was like, check out any classic sci-fi anthology or catch a Syfy "original" movie. 

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