The very word “robot” came from science fiction—it first appeared in R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek from 1921. As so often in sci-fi, the concept revealed more about the present-day world of the author than the future. The impact of industrialization and assembly line techniques on society was a hot topic in the 1920s, and Čapek obsessed on a factory making “artifical people” (or “robots” as he called them), just as Aldous Huxley would imagine mass production of flesh-and-blood people a decade later in Brave New World .
It is perhaps ironic that the most common use of robots today is in . . . . replacing human labor in assembly lines. Thus these mechanical wonders have gone from being the product made by manufacturing processes (in Čapek's vision) to the producer of conventional consumer items. This reality is far different from the vision for robots in science fiction, which looked forward to robotic servants, robotic teachers, robotic secretaries, even robotic companions for the lonely.
Isaac Asimov followed this path in the stories that comprise his book I, Robot . His robot “Robbie” is nursemaid to a young girl. “Speedy” is a miner sent to an outer space excavation. “Cutie” is a robot with a day job at a space station, but becomes fascinated with philosophical and religious issues, evolving into a skeptical thinker with a Cartesian orientation. Stephen Byerley is a lawyer running for Mayor of New York, and the plot in Asimov's amusing story about him (“Evidence”) turns on accusations that he is actually a robot. (Yes, it might be considered a plus by voters these days.) As these examples make clear, robots had a wide range of career choices open to them in the Asmovian scheme of things.
But you don’t read science fiction in hopes of finding future science—no matter what you may have been told. As Ray Bradbury points out, you can find stuff “on the cheap at Circuit City” these days that trump the paltry stuff envisioned in old-school sci-fi. And if Asimov’s predictions of technological evolution have gaping holes, his mind is analytic and rigorous in the highest degree as he constructs his plots.
This is shown with particular vividness in his “Three Laws of Robotics.” In case you didn’t memorize these in high school, here they are:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
You might think that these three commandments are part of the background color of I, Robot , but they actually play a central role in the nine stories that comprise Asimov’s book. When a robot is malfunctioning, or some robotic matter needs to be investigated or remediated , the Three Laws come into play. They often push the story forward or resolve the main complications in the plot.
By any measure, this is a strange state of affairs in pulp fiction of that era (or any era). In the world of genre fiction, complications in the plot are usually resolved with weapons or, at a minimum, a fistfight . It comes as little surprise that, when Hollywood finally made I, Robot into a movie, they ignored the faithful screenplay written by Harlan Ellison (a sci-fi master in his own right) with the support of Asimov, and instead opted for a more conventional script with lots of action sequences.
But if you dumb down Asimov, it is no longer Asimov. It tells us quite a bit about this author that formulaic action scenes and cinematic cliffhangers play such an insignificant part of his books, while rules and cogitation fill so important a role. Indeed, The Foundation Trilogy —the other defining work of his career—is built on the premise that a thousand years of history can unfold based on predictable rules. In I, Robot , as in that other work, Asimov is like a brilliant geometer, a Euclid of the space age, building surprising theorems out of simple postulates.
It is clear from reading his books that Isaac Asimov had a remarkable mind, analytic and penetrating. He was not a great prose stylist by any measure— like so many talented genre writers, he mimicked the pulp fiction writing conventions of his day. But the penetrating quality of his thinking gives vitality to his stories, even when the sentences are merely workmanlike.
To some extent this is the legacy of conceptual fiction as a whole—the marriage of brilliant thinking, a breathtaking ability to re-conceptualize reality, with plain vanilla writing. Asimov is perhaps the single most representative figure of this odd combination, and you need to learn to love his stories if you hope to come to grips with conceptual fiction as a whole.