Why They're Making 'I, Robot'

The following rant should be taken with this grain of salt - I haven't
actually seen the movie. I may revise my opinion when I see how
it's actually been put together. But, sadly, I doubt it.



It's a bit hard to miss all the advertising for 'I, Robot', with Will
Smith holding his big gun and the tagline "One man saw it
coming." From the ads, the basic plotline seems to be that
humanity has created robots that have now made it unnoticed into all
aspects of life - and they hate us!
They're intelligent beings, forced to slave under the oppressive yoke
of the Three Laws of Robotics, but they've discovered a 'loophole' and
are about to go berserk and kill us all! What fools we were, to
meddle with the creation of artificial life! Humanity will pay
the price for our arrogance!



Now don't get me wrong - this could make for an entertaining (albeit
hackneyed) plot. Where I begin objecting to it is that this is
supposed to be an Isaac Asimov robot story, adapted for the big
screen. (Let's leave aside the fact that the book 'I, Robot' is
actually a collection of short stories.) Isaac Asimov, you see,
had a gutful of the above theme - that humanity would create life and
overreach themselves. He believed in the principles of
engineering, which is why he created his famous Laws of Robotics:



First Law - A robot shall not harm a human, or, by inaction, allow a human to come to harm.

Second Law - A robot shall obey all instructions given to it by a human, except where this conflicts with the First Law.

Third Law - A robot shall endeavour to keep itself from harm, except where this conflicts with the First or Second Law.



Most of the plots of his robot books were from interesting situations
arising from these laws - for example, a robot apparently commits
murder in the contravention of the First Law - but the one constant in
all of them was that the Laws of Robotics never failed.
Any time a robot had apparently contravened a Law, it always turned out
it was as the result of human scheming. The only time we find
robots capable of actively harming humans are when they have
interpolated a 'Zeroth' Law of Robotics - 'A robot shall not harm humanity, nor by inaction allow humanity
to come to harm' - which modified the subsequent Laws with 'except
where this conflicts with the Zeroth Law'. So a Zeroth Law robot
was capable of harming a human if humanity, as a whole, would benefit,
but this was often difficult to justify.



The only time we run into a robot with less
than the complete set of Laws is a situation where the 'or by inaction,
allow a human to come to harm' was removed from its First Law, due to a
specific hazard that was more dangerous to robots than to humans.
Robots would therefore rush in to 'rescue' humans from this calculated
risk, and fry themselves - this started getting expensive. But
although this particular robot was under no obligation to protect a
human in danger, it was still completely bound by the Laws it had.



It wouldn't, for example, be going berserk on a city street throwing
humans around like rag dolls, as the trailer for 'I, Robot'
depicts. Because that would be causing harm to a human, which is
still prevented even by its incomplete laws.



So why are they making 'I, Robot'? It's because they're
environmentalists, set upon making a clean, renewable source of energy.



They're going to attach magnets to the remains of Isaac Asimov and harness his spinning in his grave.