I, Robot
So, I’m not entirely sure where I’m going to go with this “lead the discussion” thing, but I’ll see what I can do.
We’ll start with the fundamentals; the three laws of robotics. Do they make sense? If you were building an autonomous robot, do you think that you’d incorporate any of the three laws? All of them?
I’m inclined to say that we’d never build completely autonomous robot (and possibly that the three laws, in fact, mean that Asimov’s robots aren’t autonomous either) because that’s just not how robotics have come to be used. In general, our current society uses robots to perform very specific and repeatable tasks. The military uses robots a lot (and would love to use them more). And while for right now most of the “harming humans” bits are still controlled by humans, there are always calls for papers on Thinking Attack Robots. DARPA would love for someone to build them an unmanned attack vehicle that could accurately decide to fire upon a designated target.
However, there’s still an underlying fascination with Asimov’s laws. Maybe it’s he got there first, or there’s some resonance with the laws in general, but even in military robotics circles, there’s some attention paid to the Three Laws of Robotics.
Moving on! Susan Calvin vs the other Women: Gender Roles in Asimov’s Fiction.
I found it interesting that Asimov picked a female “main” character to provide the narrative structure of the collection. Even more interesting when you compare Susan to the other women that show up in the stories. All of the other women are what I consider to be 1950s housewives-style women; Calvin is a hard-core scientist who is married to her job. Is this a sign of progressiveness on Asimov’s part, or does the fact that she is unwed and clearly anti-people lessen that somewhat? I would argue that it lessens it a little but is still fairly progressive given the original publication dates (1941-1950). I know that I enjoyed the book more as a girl reading them and got more out of them because I better identified with the main character than I would have had Susan been a Steven.
That said, the stories are fairly dated both from a social and from a technological perspective. All of the women except Susan are housewives who don’t work outside the home. We ran into this somewhat with Mote, and touched on it with Wizard of Earthsea. I’d be interested in a compare/contrast of social issue on all three books if anyone wants to take that particular debate and run with it.
I, however, will run with the technological aspects. Asimov’s world as envisioned here is clearly off in many ways to our point of view. We’re seventy years past the initial writing here, and many of them (to me) seem somewhat quaint and out dated. There’s too much focus on technology that does not appear to be coming to pass (robotics) and no mention of the major technological earthquakes that have rocked our world - the Internet and Wireless/Digital technologies to name the biggest ones. Of course, it’s easy to see why Asimov would have missed these; Arpanet wasn’t even started until the late 1960s, and wireless technologies were in their infancies in the late 1940s. I’d have missed them too, and it makes me wonder what globe-changing technologies are being written about RIGHT NOW to which we are completely oblivious.
It also makes me wonder if science fiction from the modern era is different than the Asimov era because of the realization that we have really wretched track records in predicting the future. Most speculative fiction from the 1940s and 50s, to me, seem to be saying “This is how it will be.” The fiction of the modern era feels more like “Given this concept taken to extremes, things could look like this.” Do other folks get the same vibe?
At this point, I’m at over a page of comments, so I’ll leave the last few things as simply jotted notes: Firstly, humanoid robots. In Asimov’s tales, the Uncanny Valley doesn’t seem to be an issue. Also, we as a race seem to want humanoid robots; folks continue to try and develop them. Why do we keep trying to do this?
And last, my favorite story in the collection was “Escape.” My least favorite was “The Inevitable Conflict.” Discuss your own best and least if you’d like. You can even do me one better and say why one was good and one not as good.
More later if I think of it!