Working Around The Laws

By the final story in I, Robot, the robots had become so advanced and intelligent that they no longer could be understood or controlled by human beings. We have talked a lot in this class about humans creating something “superior” to themselves and how that is a fallacy in itself, but in all of those cases—Frankenstein and earlier versions of the robots—humans retained some characteristic that differentiated themselves from the robots. In Frankenstein it was beauty, in R.U.R. it was emotion, and in early versions of the I, Robot robots it was flaws in the robotic design that made them problematic in some way. By the end of I, Robot, however, they had become superior to humans in every possible way: computing power, eloquence, and overall intelligence were all far above that of human beings. Stephen could even, theoretically, be elected as a human politician when he may very well have been a robot in disguise.

            The only thing that kept the robots “below” people, in the sense that humans still had some semblance of control, were the three laws. They forced robots to obey human beings and stopped them from harming humans at all costs. However, by the final story in the novel, robots had averted the first law by changing “humans” to mean “humanity”. Robots could not protect humanity without protecting themselves because human kind had become so dependent on robots to avoid any conflict. In other words, robots allowed themselves to be the dominant “species” by justifying their rule under the first law of robotics. The laws were put in place by people out of fear of the robots “rising up”, but in the end the robots were able to use the laws to justify exactly what the laws were put in place to prevent.