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.
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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.
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Isaac Asimov |
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.
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John W. Campbell |
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.
*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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