I, Robot

I, Robot
Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov’s ROBOT series – from the iconic collection I, ROBOT to four classic novels – contains some of the most influential works in the history of science fiction. Establishing and testing the THREE LAWS OF ROBOTICS, they continue to shape the understanding and design of artificial intelligence to this day.What happens when a robot begins to question its creators? What would be the consequences of creating a robot with a sense of humour? Or the ability to lie? How do we truly tell the difference between man and machine?In I, Robot, Asimov sets out the Three Laws of Robotics – designed to protect humans from their robotic creations – and pushes them to their limits and beyond.Following genius robopsychologist Dr. Susan Calvin and engineers Powell and Donovan, these short stories helped to transform artificial intelligence from a dream into a science and changed perceptions of robots for ever.

Copyright (#uf5b02f29-07df-5a59-95b7-f38e6b9c7641)

HarperVoyager

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First published in Great Britain by Dobson Books Ltd 1967

Copyright © Isaac Asimov 1950, 1977

Cover design and illustration by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Isaac Asimov asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008279554

Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780007369355

Version: 2018-04-17

Contents

Cover (#u2728542a-8f94-5750-bd93-ab82c9bad3fb)

Title Page (#uc24b415c-713c-563d-b68a-6438398c4cae)

Copyright

Introduction

1. Robbie

2. Runaround

3. Reason

4. Catch That Rabbit

5. Liar!

6. Little Lost Robot

7. Escape!

8. Evidence

9. The Evitable Conflict

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

The Three Laws of Robotics

1 – A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2 – A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3 – A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D.

Introduction (#uf5b02f29-07df-5a59-95b7-f38e6b9c7641)

I looked at my notes and I didn’t like them. I’d spent three days at US Robots and might as well have spent them at home with the Encyclopedia Tellurica.

Susan Calvin had been born in the year 1982, they said, which made her seventy-five now. Everyone knew that. Appropriately enough, US Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. was seventy-five also, since it had been in the year of Dr Calvin’s birth that Lawrence Robertson had first taken out incorporation papers for what eventually became the strangest industrial giant in man’s history. Well, everyone knew that, too.

At the age of twenty, Susan Calvin had been part of the particular Psycho-Math seminar at which Dr Alfred Lanning of US Robots had demonstrated the first mobile robot to be equipped with a voice. It was a large, clumsy unbeautiful robot, smelling of machine-oil and destined for the projected mines on Mercury. —But it could speak and make sense.

Susan said nothing at that seminar; took no part in the hectic discussion period that followed. She was a frosty girl, plain and colorless, who protected herself against a world she disliked by a mask-like expression and hypertrophy of intellect. But as she watched and listened, she felt the stirrings of a cold enthusiasm.

She obtained her bachelor’s degree at Columbia in 2003 and began graduate work in cybernetics.

All that had been done in the mid-twentieth century on ‘calculating machines’ had been upset by Robertson and his positronic brain-paths. The miles of relays and photocells had given way to the spongy globe of plantinumiridium about the size of a human brain.

She learned to calculate the parameters necessary to fix the possible variables within the ‘positronic brain’, to construct ‘brains’ on paper such that the responses to given stimuli could be accurately predicted.

In 2008, she obtained her Ph.D. and joined United States Robots as a ‘Robopsychologist’, becoming the first great practitioner of a new science. Lawrence Robertson was still president of the corporation; Alfred Lanning had become director of research.

For fifty years, she watched the direction of human progress change – and leap ahead.