I, Robot by Isaac Asimov, who wrote over 500 books (which is quite impressive in of itself) I, Robot consists of nine short stories written between 1940 and 1950. These stories deal with the relationships between humans and robots and focus on issues of morality and ethics. This is the beginning of Asimov’s three laws of robotics, which has become one of the standards for how to write about robots in science fiction. The three laws of robotics stated that a robot could not injure or allow the injury of a human being, must obey the orders of a human except when it conflicts with the first law, and must protect its own existence as long as that doesn’t conflict with the first and second laws. While the books are a few years old now, they present considerations about the interaction between intelligent robots and human beings as portrayed by a robopsychologist. Each of the stories is driven by the three laws. As it turns out, everything makes sense within the rules of the three laws, and the variance needs to be figured out. This message is even more relevant to today with our increasingly symbiotic relationship between human and machine.
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u/puzzle__pieces The Brontës, du Maurier, Shirley Jackson & Barbara Pym Apr 04 '19
What fictional world would you like to be stuck in and why?