Episode: 4300
Title: HPR4300: Isaac Asimov: I, Robot
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4300/hpr4300.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 22:38:40

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,300 for Friday the 24th of January 2025.
Today's show is entitled, Isaac Asimov, Iroba.
It is part of the series' science fiction and fantasy.
It is hosted by Ahukah and is about 18 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, a look at the robot stories of Isaac Asimov and the three laws of robotics.
Hello, this is Ahukah, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio in another exciting episode
in our series on science fiction and fantasy.
I'm going to continue taking a look at Isaac Asimov, one of the big three from the golden
age of science fiction.
We want to take a look at the robot stories and I'm just, this is just going to be about
the short stories.
There were also novels but they go in a slightly different direction and deserve their own
focus for reasons that will become clear as we get into them.
But for now, robot stories, and if you go back to when pulp magazines dominated science
fiction, robots were a common feature in stories and they frequently featured in the cover art.
But generally as an anthropoid robot molesting curvaceous young ladies.
This never made a lot of sense since there is not much a robot can usefully do with a
curvaceous young female, but you have to remember the audience.
As we said at the beginning of the series, the old joke is that the golden age of science
fiction is 14.
And while robots had no real interest in curvaceous young females, 14 year old boys, and they were
overwhelmingly boys, barely had room in their brains for anything else.
And robots were considered highly dangerous creations that would bring about the end of
civilization if not restrained.
Now in many ways it was similar to what we say today about artificial intelligence.
And since conflict is an essential part of a good story, this was an easy way to get
your story going.
But Isaac Asimov had a different idea.
He thought robots could be developed with safeguards that would enable them to be helpers instead
of threats.
Now his first robot story, which was called Robbie, and I've got links in the show notes
to this stuff, published in 1940, was about a robot who is a companion to a young girl,
but the girl's mother is concerned that he just might be a danger because he's a robot.
And also because the girl seems so attached to him, she worries that the girl might
have problems socializing with other children.
So she insists that the robot gets returned to the factory, the girl moaps, then the father
arranges a visit to the factory, and somehow the robot ends up saving the girl's life
and all as well.
Now this was just a warm up story, it was one of the early stories Asimov wrote, and
he had not really come into his full powers as a writer.
But in 2016, this story was given a 1941 retro Hugo for Best Story.
Frankly, I think this is mostly in recognition of what he started with all of his robot
stories, sort of like sometimes someone gets an Oscar, not so much for the performance
they just gave, but for a whole body of work, and I think that's what was going on here.
The story itself does not seem to me to be outstanding, though it is a perfectly good
story.
Now, this shows the kind of story that Asimov wanted to write, but he didn't hit upon
his formula until the second robot story called Run Around, which was published in the
March 1942 issue of astounding.
It was in this story that he came up with his major invention, his three laws of robotics.
And they say, the first law is, a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction
allow a human being to come to harm.
The second law, a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such
orders would conflict with the first law.
Third law, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict
with the first or second law.
So in the story run around, these were introduced.
A chance is our most of you have heard these because they have become very widespread.
Other writers have adopted the three laws.
Now Asimov later said, he expected he would be remembered for two things, the three laws
of robotics and foundation.
Now, last time we talked about foundation, so here we're getting the other part of that.
And in an interview, what he said, and this was a 1986 interview on a Manhattan public
access show called Conversations with Harold Hudson-Channer.
The guest host, co-host, was Marilyn Voss Savant.
What he said then, it's a little humbling to think that what is most likely to survive
of everything I've said.
After all, I've published now at least 20 million words, I'll have to figure it out maybe
even more.
But of all those millions of words that I've published, I'm convinced that 100 years from
now only 60 of them will survive, the 60 that make up the three laws of robotics.
And to me it looks like he was correct in that.
But in addition to the three laws, he came up with two other things, and talking about
the brain of the robot, he said that it would be positronic.
In other words, it would somehow involve the anti-matter, opposite particle to electrons.
Now positrons and electrons annihilate each other anytime they meet.
I have no idea how that could possibly work, and it's quite likely he didn't either,
but a sure-sounded sciency.
And the physical part of the brain would consist of something he called Platinum Eritium
Sponge.
So from this point on, all of his robot stories would contain these features of the robot's
construction.
Even other things might vary, but those were the constants.
Now with these features in place, Asimov now had a slightly different problem to solve.
Good stories require conflict.
And if the robots were not the enemy anymore, but the self-safe helpers and good friends
of people, where would the conflict come from?
And Asimov's answer in the stories was to look at the three laws and see how they could
somehow have unanticipated effects.
For example, in Runaround, the problem comes when a robot on Mercury is sent out to get
some selenium that is needed for the solar power collectors.
Now this is vital.
The whole setup is that without the selenium, they would lose power, and without power,
they couldn't remain alive in the hostile environment of Mercury.
The robot goes out, but does not come back, and when they investigate, they find it is
running in circles around the selenium pool.
They eventually figure out that the selenium pool contains something that is dangerous to
the robot, and this robot had had its third-law strengthened.
And remember, the third-law is about self-preservation unless it conflicts with the other laws, but
they'd strengthened it because it was a very expensive robot to produce in this hostile
environment.
And meanwhile, the order given to it to get the selenium had been given casually, so the
second law was somewhat weakened.
The robot was running a path around the selenium where the imperatives of the second and third
laws were balanced.
Now this is interesting, it gives you some insight that he was thinking in analog terms
rather than digital terms.
Nowadays, we're so used to digital computers and ones and zeroes that it takes a second
to figure out, oh, wait a minute, what do you mean, strong or weaker?
What does that mean?
Either a law is a law or it isn't, but if you think in analog terms, you can see yes.
Things can be stronger or weaker as they get modified.
Now he had recurring characters, Paul and Donovan, who were robot technicians, and they resolved
this by placing themselves in danger.
And by doing that, the first law trumps everything else, and the first law, remember, is that
you must not allow a human being to come to harm.
Now the robot stories that followed continue to find places where the three laws somehow
went a bit astray so that they are in essence puzzle stories, where the characters need
to figure out what is going on with the robot in its interpretation of the laws.
Now these stories were, of course, originally written for and published in magazines, such
as astounding, but eventually gnom press, which we mentioned previously had collected
the foundation stories and published the foundation trilogy.
They decided to do the same thing for the robot stories, and in 1950 collected them in
a volume called iRobot.
This had the stories, as well as some framing material by another recurring character,
a Dr. Susan Calvin, who was a Robo psychologist, in other words someone who specialized in
the psychology of robots.
And she presents these stories as a series of reminiscences, even though technically
she isn't in all of them, but she is the Robo psychologist for the company, US robots
and mechanical men, the company that manufactured all the robots, and for whom Powell and Dunovan
also worked.
Just as a side note, you may have heard of a company called US Robotics, which manufactures
modems, and they very deliberately took their name from the US robots and mechanical men
of the Asimov stories.
Anyway, back to Dr. Calvin.
One of the stories featuring Dr. Calvin is Lyre, which appeared in the May 41 issue of astounding.
The idea here is that a manufacturing accident has produced a telepathic robot that can read
minds, but of course it still has the three laws and cannot do anything to harm a human,
and that includes telling them anything that would cause them pain.
So instead, the robot lies.
Dr. Calvin is caught up in this because the robot reads in her mind that she is infatuated
with a certain coworker, and tells her that this is reciprocated.
Of course, the coworker has no feelings for her at all, and she ends up heartbroken.
This is a story that has been adapted a number of times for film and television in various
countries.
And you can find that out in some of the links that I've put into the show notes.
Now, I robot was a good collection, but there were more stories, and Asimov continued writing
more stories.
So in 1964, a second volume was published called The Rest of the Robots, which contained
eight short stories, not previously collected, as well as two novels.
The novels, as I said, have their own significance, so I will discuss them separately.
But the short stories were good to have.
And eventually they came out with the complete robot in 1982, which did contain all of the
stories from both I robot and the rest of the robots, excepting, of course, the two novels.
Despite the name, however, it did not include every robot story as Amov wrote.
The reason is he kept writing.
Asimov wrote a lot of stuff.
I believe at one point there was something like 500 books.
Now, there were other robot stories.
There was a series done in collaboration with his wife, Janet Asimov.
This was a series of children's books about a robot called Norby.
Now there were 11 of these novels.
And Asimov stated that they were 90% written by his wife, Janet, but that he did read
them over and polished the prose a bit.
And of course, the publisher insisted on using Isaac's name prominently on the cover
to get better sales.
The last one, however, was written entirely by Janet a few years after Asimov's death.
Then there is a book called Robot Dreams published in 1986.
That's a collection of stories that contains one new story, which is the title story, but
it's otherwise a collection of reprints of Asimov stories originally published elsewhere.
And many of them actually have nothing specifically to do with robots.
But the title story is another Susan Calvin's story and quite good.
Then Robot Visions, published in 1990, contains one new story, the title story.
Then a few stories not previously collected in the robot collections.
And a bunch of reprinted stories that you can find in the complete robot.
It also has a number of essays, many of which had never before been collected.
Now Asimov wrote a large number of essays, I've seen numbers as high as 1,600.
I know he had a regular monthly essay on science for the magazine of fantasy and science fiction,
for which he wrote 399 monthly essays.
I know I read many of them in their original publication because I had a subscription
for a while.
Now robot stories of Asimov also have been adapted to other media.
Harlan Ellison wrote a screenplay based on I-Robot for Warner Bros.
The project fell apart, however, which is not unusual in Hollywood.
He talked to any writer that has ever had a piece of work optioned by Hollywood.
And it's like you still have no idea whether it'll ever actually be turned into a movie.
So Ellison wrote this screenplay.
He did publish it.
You can purchase it.
It's called I-Robot, the illustrated screenplay that was published in 1994.
Then Robin Williams starred in a movie based on one of Asimov's robot stories called
The Bicentennial Man.
He later turned that into a novel called The Positronic Man.
But the story was written in 1976 when the United States was having its bicentennial.
But the twist is that the bicentennial here is a reference to a robot who has lived
200 years and now wants to be recognized as a man.
This goes in a different direction from the Star Trek next generation episode, The Measure
of a Man.
It's still a good story, a bit of a tearjerker, so have your Kleenex handy if you're watching
it.
Finally, there was a movie called I-Robot, 2004 starring Will Smith that uses a number
of the names of Asimov's characters, but otherwise has nothing to do with Asimov's
stories or writing.
I'd call it a standard Will Smith action movie, and if you like that sort of thing you're
welcome to it, but I have no use for it.
So these are the stories that laid out Asimov's ideas about one potential future with robots.
I like the stories quite a bit, as you can probably tell, and I can recommend them without
hesitation.
Then there are the novels, and they take things in a somewhat different direction and require
their own focus, so that will be the next thing I tackle in this particular series.
But until then, this is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio signing off, and is always encouraging
you to support Free Software.
Bye bye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio, and Hacker Public Radio does work.
Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, you click on our contribute link to find out
how easy it really is.
Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the Internet Archive,
and our sings.net.
On the Sadois status, today's show is released under Creative Commons, Attribution 4.0 International
License.
