Robot Visions

Meanwhile, our heroes must have the selenium. They chase after the robot in special suits, discover the problem and wonder how to correct it. After several failures, the correct answer is hit upon. One of the men deliberately exposes himself to Mercury’s sun in such a way that unless the robot rescues him, he will surely die. That brings the First Law into operation, which being superior to both Second and Third, pulls the robot out of his useless orbit and brings on the necessary happy ending.

It is in the story “Runaround,” by the way, that I believe I first made use of the term “robotics” (implicitly defined as the science of robot design, construction, maintenance, etc). Years later, I was told that I had invented the term and that it had never seen publication before. I do not know whether this is true. If it is true, I am happy, because I think it is a logical and useful word, and I hereby donate it to real workers in the field with all good will.

None of my other robot stories spring so immediately out of the Three Laws as does “Runaround” but all are born of the Laws in some way. There is the story, for instance, of the mind-reading robot who was forced to lie because he was unable to tell any human being anything other than that which the human in question wished to hear. The truth, you see, would almost invariably cause “harm” to the human being in the form of disappointment, disillusion, embarrassment, chagrin and other similar emotions, all of which were but too plainly visible to the robot.

Then there was the puzzle of the man who was suspected of being a robot, that is, of having a quasi-protoplasmic body and a robot’s “positronic brain.” One way of proving his humanity would be for him to break the First Law in public, so he obliges by deliberately striking a man. But the story ends in doubt because there is still the suspicion that the other “man” might also be a robot and there is nothing in the Three Laws that would prevent a robot from hitting another robot.

And then we have the ultimate robots, models so advanced that they are used to precalculate such things as weather, crop harvests, industrial production figures, political developments and so on. This is done in order that world economy may be less subject to the whims of those factors which are now beyond man’s control. But these ultimate robots, it seems, are still subject to the First Law. They ca

The interrelationship of man and robot is not to be neglected. Mankind may know of the existence of the Three Laws on an intellectual level and yet have an ineradicable fear and distrust for robots on an emotional level. If you wanted to invent a term, you might call it a “Frankenstein complex.” There is also the more practical matter of the opposition of labor unions, for instance, to the possible replacement of human labor by robot labor.

This, too, can give rise to stories. My first robot story concerned a robot nursemaid and a child. The child adored its robot as might be expected, but the mother feared it, as might also be expected. The nub of the story lay in the mother’s attempt to get rid of it and in the child’s reaction to that.

My first full-length robot novel, “The Caves of Steel” (1954), peers further into the future, and is laid in a time when other planets, populated by emigrating Earthmen, have adopted a thoroughly robotized economy, but where Earth itself, for economic and emotional reasons, still objects to the introduction of the metal creatures. A murder is committed, with robot-hatred as the motive. It is solved by a pair of detectives, one a man, one a robot, with a great portion of the deductive reasoning (to which detective stories are prone) revolving about the Three Laws and their implications.

I have managed to convince myself that the Three Laws are both necessary and sufficient for human safety in regard to robots. It is my sincere belief that some day when advanced human-like robots are indeed built, something very like the Three Laws will be built into them. I would enjoy being a prophet in this respect, and I regret only the fact that the matter probably ca

This essay was written in 1956. In the years since, “robotics” has indeed entered the English language and is universally used, and I have lived to see roboticists taking the Three Laws very seriously.

The New Teachers

The percentage of older people in the world is increasing and that of younger people decreasing, and this trend will continue if the birthrate should drop and medicine continue to extend the average life span.

In order to keep older people imaginative and creative and to prevent them from becoming an ever-growing drag on a shrinking pool of creative young, I have recommended frequently that our educational system be remodeled and that education be considered a lifelong activity.

But how can this be done? Where will an the teachers come from?

Who says, however, that an teachers must be human beings or even animate?

Suppose that over the next century communications satellites become numerous and more sophisticated than those we’ve placed in space so far. Suppose that in place of radio waves the more capacious laser beam of visible light becomes the chief communications medium.

Under these circumstances, there would be room for many minions of separate cha

Each person (child, adult, or elderly) can have his own private outlet to which could be attached, at certain desirable periods of time, his or her personal teaching machine. It would be a far more versatile and interactive teaching machine than anything we could put together now, for computer technology will also have advanced in the interval.

We can reasonably hope that the teaching machine will be sufficiently intricate and flexible to be capable of modifying its own program (that is, “learning”) as a result of the student’s input.

In other words, the student will ask questions, answer questions, make statements, offer opinions, and from all of this, the machine will be able to gauge the student well enough to adjust the speed and intensity of its course of instruction and, what’s more, shift it in the direction of the student interest displayed.

We can’t imagine a personal teaching machine to be very big, however. It might resemble a television set in size and appearance. Can so small an object contain enough information to teach the students as much as they want to know, in any direction intellectual curiosity may lead them? No, not if the teaching machine is self-contained-but need it be?

In any civilization with computer science so advanced as to make teaching machines possible, there will surely be thoroughly computerized central libraries. Such libraries may even be interco

All teaching machines would be plugged into this planetary library and each could then have at its disposal any book, periodical, document, recording, or video cassette encoded there. If the machine has it, the student would have it too, either placed directly on a viewing screen, or reproduced in print-on-paper for more leisurely study.

Of course, human teachers will not be totally eliminated. In some subjects, human interaction is essential-athletics, drama, public speaking, and so on. There is also value, and interest, in groups of students working in a particular field-getting together to discuss and speculate with each other and with human experts, sparking each other to new insights.