I’m researching robots for a new screenplay this month and came across some really interesting and unfamiliar structural stuff that will no doubt double into to other topics.

For instance, in a 1942 short story Runaround (which later became the basis for I, Robot), Isaac Asimov wrote out “The 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 any orders given to 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.

These are all interesting in the way they grant limited agency to inanimate objects, and ask moral responsibilities of entirely subsisting, mechanical things. According to the above prescriptions, Robots are not really Beings as such because their limitations are not known to them. (This is what leads Dick to his “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”)

But these avoid (or maybe not if you agree, like others, that they are flawed) the big truth about Robots: The indicate the GOING-WRONG of things.

Robots are an addendum to cultural notions of “Perfection” and “Idealism.” They’re always depicted (here I’m thinking of the animation masterpieces “Iron Giant” and “Laputa” and “Wall-E”) as either Artifacts or Anomalies; Relics of an advanced time that imploded amongst their own setup, or else explosive Short-circuits, acting out against the central purpose it was created to accomplish (and often because of that very thing itself).

So, while Robots are deployed in narratives as the pinnacle achievement of industrialized society, their importance in science fiction film and literature is to point out the exact opposite. 

The One Law of Robotics: Human being are a fragile lot and prone to irrational, self-defeating desires.