I, Robot

No one explores the idea of A.I. better than Isaac Asimov, so when robotics experts Powell and Donovan build an advanced robot called QT-1 or “Cutie” for short, “be careful what you wish for,” comes to mind. Cutie isn’t so bad, except he seems to doubt everything he’s told after he’s created, including the fact that humans built him. When Powell asks Cutie why he doesn’t believe it, Cutie claims it’s intuition. When Powell tries to explain to Cutie about the stars, planets, and space, Cutie disagrees with him and decides to “reason” out things on his own. Unfortunately, this… show more.

Linked together by a framing narrative, I, Robot is a collection of short stories written between 1940 and 1950 about, you guessed it, robots. Much of what sci-fi does with robots is drawn from these seminal tales, not least the concept that robots should be self-limiting in their ability to do harm, an idea pulled together by Asimov in his three laws of robotics. The three laws and variations thereon have been relied upon by sci-fi writers ever since. Read and enjoy. Then consider the times when the stories are set (Asimov’s future is roughly our present) and weep with… show more.

Like many boys of my age, I started reading comics with barely a grasp of written English. I liked the artwork and then when I learned to read, the words. Luckier than most, my mother read to her two little boys at night. Call of the Wild, Flika (a Horsey Thing), White Fang, Black Beauty, The Railway Children, The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, Swallows and Amazons and so many more, and like children do, we grew, and we learned.

One of the very first collections of short stories I read was I, Robot I was instantly fascinated. Imagine another… show more.

There’s no other author who I’ve been compared to more than Asimov, and my readers have been astonished when I’ve confessed to them that I’ve never read any Asimov…that is until I was putting this list together and delved into I, Robot, Asimov’s collection of short stories in which his famous “Three Laws of Robotics,” first appears.

And after reading it, to all my readers, I get it. 

I wish I’d read him earlier!  

The concepts are gigantic, both technologically, but also philosophically. I love the way he uses paradoxes to demonstrate that answers are not as simple as… show more.

I, Robot was the first piece of science fiction to really opened my mind to the subject of artificial intelligence. It presented such a wonderful blend of sci-fi, psychology, and philosophy that I instantly fell in love. Far from the killer robots of Terminator, Asimov’s I, Robot instead takes a more measured, hopeful approach to the subject. In the end, it is the perfect book for the intellectual science fiction fan. 

When people think about artificial intelligence or robots, invariably they mention Isaac Asimov’s classic book, I, Robot, which is really a collection of stories, held together by a thin overall plot. The book was published in 1950, but some of the stories appeared earlier in various science fiction magazines in the 1940s. Asimov, who was knowledgeable in a variety of scientific and mathematical fields as well as literature and philosophy, used his ample imagination to deal with issues that were far from reality at that time, but not so far now.

The central character of the novel, Dr. Susan… show more.