Resumo de I, Robot - Isaac Asimov

Between September 1940 and June 1950, the yet-to-be master of modern science fiction, Isaac Asimov, wrote a series of short stories (nine to be exact) on the interaction of sentient robots with human society. To eliminate the threat that the much stronger and ultimately more intelligent robots might pose (and thus make their acceptance by humanity of the future more plausible to the reader), Asimov and his mentor, John W. Campbell Jr., constrained their behavior by the ingenious and elegant ?Three Laws of Robotics? (the last term of which Asimov was the first to coin):
1. A robot shall not harm a human being nor, though inaction, allow a human bring to come to harm.
2. A robot shall obey all orders given it by a human being, except where this conflicts with the First Law.
3. A robot shall protect its existence, except where this conflicts with the First and/or Second Laws.

These are not mere ethical principles with which robots are imbued by education, but the basic equations in accordance with which the neuronic circuits of the robot?s positronic brain have been established. Robots can no more circumvent them than we and all members of the animal kingdom can emancipate ourselves from our most basic instincts and normal biological functions.

These nine stories were published in book form following the appearance of the last one in ?Astounding Science Fiction?. Though each story is complete unto itself, a thread of continuity runs through them in the character of Dr. Susan Calvin, Chief Roboticist of U.S. Robotics, an austere and coldly professional scientist who loves her cybernetic charges more than her own kind, though she slowly comes to realize that the Three Laws do not produce a line of perfect servants.

This, then, is the common theme of the collection. The first story, Robbie, deals with the most primitive robot to be accepted for human service, one which can hear and understand but is incapable of speech. For Robbie, the Three Laws are the be-all and end-all of his existence and from them he derives the pure and innocent love for the little girl in his care. Later stories, however, deal with more sophisticated robots who are capable of more subtle interpretations of what may be harmful to their owners and superiors. Reason portrays a particularly resourceful robot who founds a religion among his own fellows, the tenets of which forbid the presence of human overseers in a power-generating space station which no longer requires supervision by men and whose environment may be harmful to natural organisms. Another story depicting a variant of the Second Law is Liar. The accidental production of a telepathic robot leads to unpleasant complications, since the poor artifact can read the troubled minds of the humans it associates with and, wishing to spare them needless psychological harm, assures them that all is well (and tries to prove this by its own performance), with disastrous results.

Robots begin to predominate in the penultimate and last stories, Evidence and The Evitable Conflict, in which Dr. Calvin is, on the one hand, called upon to tame the aggressively benevolent aspirations of a human-impersonating robot who runs for public office, and, on the other, to cope with the mysterious mistakes committed by well-intentioned but aberrant super-genius robots.

Chaos theory is very much in evidence throughout the collection, showing that as systems grow increasingly more complex, they become proportionately less predictable, regardless of the basic safeguards at the very heart of the concept.

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