I, Robot.

One of Igor’s former masters had made a tick-tock man, all levers and gearwheels and cranks and clockwork. Instead of a brain, it had a long tape punched with holes. Instead of a heart, it had a big spring. Provided everything in the kitchen was very carefully positioned, the thing could sweep the floor and make a passable cup of tea. If everything WASN’T carefully positioned, or if the ticking, clicking thing hit an unexpected bump, then it’d strip the plaster off the walls and make a furious cup of cat.

 

Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time 

I'm so excited - we're getting a robot!

Okay, it's a second hand robot, but still, it's a robot.  Karli's mother and stepfather are replacing their Roomba™, and they're letting us have their old model. 

Robots have been a mainstay of the science fiction vocabulary from the beginning, although they lacked their unique and distinctive name until 1920, when the word "Robot" entered the English language.  It's taken from the play R.U.R  (Rossum's Universal Robots) written by Czech author Karel Čapek: the word "robot" is derived from the word for "worker" in Czech, or perhaps a more accurate translation is "serf" or "slave", there's a sense of servitude to it.  

Čapek's play was a morality story dealing with the creation and oppression of an artificial race that eventually rises up and wipes out humanity.  In current science fiction terminology, I'd define Dr. Rossum's creations as androids rather than robots, they're artificial self-aware entities that resemble humans rather than programmable mechanical constructions. 

This is an important distinction: over time, the line between artificial intelligence and robots has become blurred to the point where they're considered to be synonymous, whereas in actuality, a robot is almost the opposite of artificial intelligence.  As per Terry Pratchett's tick-tock man, a robot is restricted to its programming. That programming can be very detailed and cover a wide range of eventualities, but ultimately, if something happens that isn't covered by the program, a robot can't extrapolate to a solution - and you end up with a furious cup of cat.

The company that manufactures the Roomba™ line is called iRobot, and I'm a little surprised that they haven't run into copyright issues - not from Apple, who have a pretty firm grip on the lower case "i" prefix, but from the estate of Isaac Asimov regarding his 1950 novel I, Robot.* 

If robotic science fiction has a patron saint, it's Asimov. Countless other science fiction authors have utilized robots in their stories, but Asimov is best known for having created a kind of mechanical morality for robots:  the Three Laws of Robotics, first used in his 1942 short story Runaround.

The Three Laws are as follows:

First Law
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Third Law
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

It's an interesting attempt to create an ethical structure for machines, but in most of Asimov's robot stories, the result tends to be the digital equivalent of neurosis or insanity, as robot after robot is rendered inoperative by conflicts between the Three Laws.  (In the original story, a robot sent to get life-saving supplies from a dangerous location ends up running in circles when the Laws achieve mathematical balance in its programming.)

The Laws also have a strong feeling of  "slavery and servitude", as per Jean-Luc Picard's defense of Lieutenant Commander Data's freedom to choose in the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Imagine being programmed so that self-preservation is only the third priority on your list!

- Sid

* To be completely accurate, it's not really a novel, it's a collection of previously published short stories combined through a loose narrative plot about the history of robots. And we're just not going to talk about the unfortunate movie version.