Isaac Asimov was one of the science fiction authors whose works I avidly consumed when I was in my early adolescence, and though even then I could tell that his writing lacked a certain level of nuance and style, I loved it for its cleverness and its imagination. Standing at the podium at science fiction conventions, expounding on any subject under the sun, he was like a polymath Woody Allen with the neurosis circuits disabled, and his optimistic rationalism — even in the 1970s, an era during which optimism was hard to make credible — was infectious. (Read Cory Doctorow’s appreciation of Asimov in Wired for more.)
So I don’t think I’ll be able to bear going to see the new movie “inspired by” his “I, Robot” stories — those inventive chestnuts about what happens when robots programmed with “the three laws of robotics” tangle with the chaos of human affairs. (Chris Suellentrop in Slate offers an overview of how the movie betrays Asimov that makes me feel my decision is completely logical.) But I was glad to read this editorial in the Sunday New York Times, which thoughtfully nailed exactly what made these stories such fun:
Each of the stories in “I, Robot” works out a problem in the application of these laws, usually caused by an unforeseen implication or contradiction. Asimov’s robots are perfectly logical, and therefore all the real problems are caused by humans, who are shockingly unaware of the way their intentions and emotions run counter to logic. What look like manufacturing flaws in the robots nearly always turn out to be faults in the way a command was articulated. Humans, it turns out, are mainly good at bossing other humans around. Our computers remind us of this every day. |
The “I, Robot” stories, in other words, are exercises in logical debugging that happen to take the form of miniature mysteries.
Saying “the real problems are caused by humans” is, of course, awfully close to saying, “It’s the user’s fault!” — an excuse that conscientious software developers and designers shun. Yet, as I dig deeper into work on my book about software, I’m learning a lot more about exactly how hard it is to make the absolute logic of computing serve the messy ambiguities of human desire, when all the pressure of the undertaking is to make things work the other way — to force us human beings to conform to the rigorous precision of machines. Asimov’s wonderful stories pre-imagined this dilemma for us. Maybe someday he’ll find a filmmaker who can do his particular imagination justice.
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