I, Robot

Aside from Will Smith staring back at me from the cover of the copy that the Open University supplied me with, this has been very enjoyable.

Vastly superior cover.

You are makeshift. I, on the other hand, am a finished product.

Fairly obviously, I was familiar with Asimov’s work as a whole, and I think you would have to have been living a very ignorant life not to be aware of his 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.

Now I was sent the book, as previously alluded to, by the OU as part of the course material for one of my last 10 points worth of study which takes the form of T184 – Robotics & the meaning of life: a practical guide to things that think, that whilst strictly being a course from their engineering department, obviously crosses some philosophical borders. The probably all too apparent issues that would arise should robots be given some degree of sentience and autonomy have been covered many times, by many authors, in many mediums (Skynet, anyone? Interestingly the catastrophically self-aware US defence computer system has a real life UK counterpart – Skynet, a military communications system). But it must be stressed that Asimov was arguably the first and the greatest to tackle such issues.