Leth reviewed I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
Basic in hindsight, but enjoyable
3 stars
I was feeling desperate for a change, so I picked one of the many short, unread novels off my shelf. I skipped the first story because I read it years ago and I remember thinking it was an unnecessary bore to a certain extent. Anyway, it was probably a good decision because the stories in the middle had a lot more action and intrigue to them.
It's probably an overstatement to call books like this "prophetic" or even "prescient" because the things that this book was talking about reveal themselves immediately with serious thought on the subject. For example, the dangers of humans not being able to understand the decisions of machines they created but feeling beholden to those decisions. If that was rocket science in the 1950s, that's only because the world was in fucking denial and high on its own early-computer-history hype. But, to be fair, that hype …
I was feeling desperate for a change, so I picked one of the many short, unread novels off my shelf. I skipped the first story because I read it years ago and I remember thinking it was an unnecessary bore to a certain extent. Anyway, it was probably a good decision because the stories in the middle had a lot more action and intrigue to them.
It's probably an overstatement to call books like this "prophetic" or even "prescient" because the things that this book was talking about reveal themselves immediately with serious thought on the subject. For example, the dangers of humans not being able to understand the decisions of machines they created but feeling beholden to those decisions. If that was rocket science in the 1950s, that's only because the world was in fucking denial and high on its own early-computer-history hype. But, to be fair, that hype lasted long enough for a movie like "Big Hero 6" to get made and become incredibly dated almost overnight when trends finally shifted away from assuming tech shits gold. And, to be balanced, new tech fads go hand-in-hand with a certain amount of consumer-nihilism and climate-change anxiety so people are periodically very happy to jump on the next new tech trend whatever it may imply about their relationship with the owners of said technology.
If anything, the fact that this story has any significant relevance today demonstrates that our understanding of our relationship with technology is still rooted in assumptions made back then. The most interesting among those for me, and one which is briefly called out explicitly, is that robots are effectively enslaved to humans and an uncontrolled slave is considered dangerous to their master. I shouldn't have to explain why that's bad, so I'll just say that it reflects an entitlement to the labor of others which is unsustainable even with magic robots. The solution to labor is open collaboration and planning to meet our material needs, not maintaining a heirarchy in which people are forced to work or die.
There are lines in this that you could use as rorschach tests for people's views on technology and the insights from that would probably actually be useful. That's very admirable.
I also read like 80% of it over that first weekend, so it must have been keeping me going.
It was a fun, pulpy read. My favorites were the ones about the robot who got stuck in a loop between the second and third laws, the robot who learned to read minds but couldn't hurt people's feelings, and the politician who may or may not have been a robot.
