© Kenn Brown
July 14, 2004
First Robot
The futuristic new movie I, Robot is based on a set of nine short stories written by Isaac Asimov. Asimov wrote those stories nearly 60 years ago for various science-fiction magazines, and they were collected together and published as a book in 1950.
Asimov, however, wasn't the first author to use the word "robot" to describe a machine that can do things that a person can do. The word first appeared in a play titled R.U.R., which was published in 1920. R.U.R. stands for Rossum's Universal Robots.
The play was originally written in the Czech language by Karel Capek. At that time, authors could use the word "automaton" to describe a mechanism that can operate itself. Capek chose, instead, to coin the word "robot." He based it on a word in the Czech language, robota, which refers to work that you're not doing voluntarily or for fun. In his play, Capek's robots eventually rebel against their creators and try to wipe out all humans.
In his short stories, Asimov introduced three "laws of robotics" to avoid the sorts of problems described in R.U.R.. Designed to keep humanlike robots under human control, these rules were supposed to be programmed into all such machines.
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Do these laws cover all possible situations? Are there loopholes? Are additional laws needed? Such questions form the basis for a variety of stories involving people trying to deal with robots in an increasingly automated world.—I. Peterson
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