Secondly, each story is like an ingenious logic puzzle where the experts try to figure out why robots are behaving weirdly, even with the three Laws of Robotics in place. I liked the diversity of robot jobs, such as nursemaid, miner, technician and even a false prophet with a messiah complex. It paints a picture of a larger story of societal change. At first they’re not much more than toys, but after a while you indeed need a psychologist to figure out their problems. Each story is set a little bit farther into the future (as remembered by an ageing robo-psychologist) and so the robots become more and more complex as we work through the book. First, a framing device that works wonders. I liked this book much, much more than I thought I would, because of two reasons. His achievement is that even with such laws in place, life is complex, issues will arise, and humans trying to live with robots is an unpredictable road to go down on. The ultimate achievement of Asimov in I, Robot is not that he invented the Three Laws as an illustration on how humans and robots could conceivably live together in harmony. This idea is often presented in the sense of “look how clever it was of Asimov to invent these laws”, but it is even cleverer of Asimov that these laws constantly fall short in his stories. For one thing, it is a series of nine short stories, each one dealing with new social consequences of robots.Īnd here we come to the famous “ Three Laws of Robotics” in the book, which state that robots may not injure humans and so on.

The book is nothing like the 2004 film, at all. And for Asimov himself, it was the diminutive start of an illustrious writing career that would last for decades. Most notably, I, Robot opened everyone’s eyes to how interesting robots could be. Isaac Asimov may not have invented the word ‘robot’ (that honour goes to the Capek brothers) but his book series pushed the robot into our collective consciousness as no other piece of popular entertainment has done.

I, Robot by Isaac Asimov