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After watching Foundation I was curious about Asimov's Robot books.
The stories so far (I Robot and The Rest of the Robots) are quite simple and a bit crude, but they are also refreshing in their simplicity.
I see the stories as Asimov's take on the advances in robotics and computing he witnessed. It's funny in a way that the robot themes in science fiction haven't changed all that much since then.
@Liesvanrompaey@bookstodon I loved the way he designed the 3 laws of robotics and then challenged those in his stories, trying to find a way around them to get the robots to harm people.
@Liesvanrompaey@bookstodon The later Foundation novels Foundation’s Edge and Foundation and Earth end up tying back into the Robot stories. It’s all part of the same history. I think Asimov’s stories are much more sympathetic to robots as characters in the stories than most other science fiction. There is nothing inevitably evil, malignant, or wring with robots, and for me R. Daneel Olivaw was always the true protagonist in the books where that character appears.
Asimov clearly loved the idea of Robots, with most of the pitfalls stemming from how our ethical concerns for them backfire.
The height of Daneel's morality ends up being that he should protect humanity and life by doing as little as possible, nudging individual action like Hari's Foundation.
@btrinen@Liesvanrompaey@bookstodon Asimov was specifically trying to critique the "evil/rebellious robot" trope that became the legacy of R.U.R. by presenting a paradigm of autonomous robotics in which such a scenario was impossible
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