Plot summary
In 2015, Powell, Donovan and Robot SPD-13, also known as "Speedy", are sent to Mercury to restart operations at a mining station which was abandoned ten years before.
They discover that the photo-cell banks that provide life support to the base are short on selenium and will soon fail. The nearest selenium pool is seventeen miles away, and since Speedy can withstand Mercury's high temperatures, Donovan sends him to get it. Powell and Donovan become worried when they realize that Speedy has not returned after five hours. They use a more primitive robot to find Speedy and try to analyze what happened to it.
When they eventually find Speedy, they discover he is running in a huge circle around a selenium pool. Further, they notice that "Speedy's gait [includes] a peculiar rolling stagger, a noticeable side-to-side lurch". [1] When Speedy is asked to return with the selenium, he begins talking oddly, quoting Gilbert and Sullivan and showing symptoms that, if he were human, would be interpreted as drunkenness.
Powell eventually realizes that the selenium source contains unforeseen danger to the robot. Under normal circumstances, Speedy would observe the Second Law, but because Speedy was so expensive to manufacture, and "not a thing to be lightly destroyed", the Third Law had been strengthened "so that his allergy to danger is unusually high". As the order to retrieve the selenium was casually worded with no particular emphasis, Speedy cannot decide whether to obey it, following the Second Law, or protect himself from danger, following the strengthened Third Law. He then oscillates between positions: farther from the selenium, in which the order outweighs the need for self-preservation, and nearer the selenium, in which the compulsion of the third law is bigger and pushes him back. The conflicting Laws cause what is basically a feedback loop which confuses him to oscillate around the point where the two compulsions are of equal strength, which makes Speedy appear inebriated.
Under the Second Law Speedy should obey Powell's order to return to base, but that fails, as the conflicted positronic brain cannot accept new orders. An attempt to increase the compulsion of the Third Law fails. They place oxalic acid, which can destroy Speedy, in his path, but it merely causes Speedy to change his route until he finds a new equilibrium between the avoid-danger law and the follow-order law.
The only thing that trumps both the Second Law and Third Law is the First Law of Robotics which states that "a robot may not... allow a human being to come to harm." Therefore, Powell decides to risk his life by going out in the heat, hoping that the First Law will force Speedy to overcome his cognitive dissonance to save Powell's life. The plan works, and the team is able to repair the photocell banks.
I, Robot is a fixup collection made up of science fiction short stories by American writer Isaac Asimov. The stories originally appeared in the American magazines Super Science Stories and Astounding Science Fiction between 1940 and 1950 and were then collected into a 1950 publication Gnome Press in 1950, in an initial edition of 5,000 copies.
Isaac Asimov was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much non-fiction.
The Robot series is a series of thirty-seven science fiction short stories and six novels by American writer Isaac Asimov, published from 1940 to 1995. The series is set in a world where sentient positronic robots serve a number of purposes in society. To ensure their loyalty, the Three Laws of Robotics are programmed into these robots, with the intent of preventing them from ever becoming a danger to humanity. Later, Asimov would merge the Robot series with his Foundation series.
The Three Laws of Robotics are a set of rules devised by science fiction author Isaac Asimov, which were to be followed by robots in several of his stories. The rules were introduced in his 1942 short story "Runaround", although similar restrictions had been implied in earlier stories.
A positronic brain is a fictional technological device, originally conceived by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. It functions as a central processing unit (CPU) for robots, and, in some unspecified way, provides them with a form of consciousness recognizable to humans. When Asimov wrote his first robot stories in 1939 and 1940, the positron was a newly discovered particle, and so the buzz word "positronic" added a scientific connotation to the concept. Asimov's 1942 short story "Runaround" elaborates his fictional Three Laws of Robotics, which are ingrained in the positronic brains of nearly all of his robots.
The Complete Robot (1982) is a collection of 31 of the 37 science fiction short stories about robots by American writer Isaac Asimov, written between 1939 and 1977. Most of the stories had been previously collected in the books I, Robot and The Rest of the Robots, while four had previously been uncollected and the rest had been scattered across five other anthologies. They share a theme of the interaction of humans, robots and morality, and put together tell a larger story of Asimov's fictional history of robotics. The stories are grouped into categories.
"Blind Alley" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It was first published in the March 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, and later included in the collection The Early Asimov (1972).
"Reason" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov, first published in the April 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and collected in I, Robot (1950), The Complete Robot (1982), and Robot Visions (1990). It is part of Asimov's Robot series, and was the second of Asimov's positronic robot stories to see publication.
"Catch that Rabbit" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It was first published in the February 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and reprinted in the collections I, Robot (1950) and The Complete Robot (1982).
"Little Lost Robot" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It was first published in the March 1947 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and reprinted in the collections I, Robot (1950), The Complete Robot (1982), Robot Dreams (1986), and Robot Visions (1990).
"Escape!" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It was first published as "Paradoxical Escape" in the August 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and reprinted as "Escape!" in the collections I, Robot (1950) and The Complete Robot (1982).
"Evidence" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It was first published in the September 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and reprinted in the collections I, Robot (1950), The Complete Robot (1982), and Robot Visions (1990).
"The Evitable Conflict" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the June 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and subsequently appeared in the collections I, Robot (1950), The Complete Robot (1982), and Robot Visions (1990). It features the character Stephen Byerley from the earlier "Evidence".
".. . That Thou Art Mindful of Him" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov, which he intended to be an "ultimate" probe into the subtleties of his Three Laws of Robotics. The story first appeared in the May 1974 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction and the 1974 anthology Final Stage, edited by Edward L. Ferman and Barry N. Malzberg. It was collected in The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories (1976) and The Complete Robot (1982).
Laws of robotics are any set of laws, rules, or principles, which are intended as a fundamental framework to underpin the behavior of robots designed to have a degree of autonomy. Robots of this degree of complexity do not yet exist, but they have been widely anticipated in science fiction, films and are a topic of active research and development in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence.
"First Law" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov, first published in the October 1956 issue of Fantastic Universe magazine and later collected in The Rest of the Robots (1964) and The Complete Robot (1982). The title of the story is a reference to the first of the Three Laws of Robotics.
"Risk" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov, first published in the May 1955 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, and reprinted in the collections The Rest of the Robots (1964) and The Complete Robot (1982).
References to Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics have appeared in a wide variety of circumstances. In some cases, other authors have explored the Laws in a serious fashion. Other references, like those made in the satirical newspaper The Onion, are clearly parodic.
Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Odyssey is a science fiction novel written in 1987 by Michael P. Kube-McDowell. It is part of the series Isaac Asimov's Robot City, inspired by Isaac Asimov's Robot series. The 1995 computer game Robot City is based on the plot of Odyssey.
