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SPOILERS FOR WORKS OF ASIMOV Your suggestion was a plot point in one of Asimov's original robot stories! There was a robot on some hot, unforgiving planet or
by daveloyall 11y ago
SPOILERS FOR WORKS OF ASIMOV
Your suggestion was a plot point in one of Asimov's original robot stories!
There was a robot on some hot, unforgiving planet or moon.. Io? Mercury? Its duty was to perform some kind of mining, I forget.
It never encountered humans that were not co-workers (supervisors) and it was expensive...
So, the engineers tweaked the weight of the second and third laws so that it would tend to protect itself from the environment, even if a human carelessly ordered it to perform some work that it might not survive.
The story started when careless orders were indeed given. The robot began to "act drunk", as in it was wandering around singing. The recurring character "robot psychology expert guy" showed up to unravel the mystery (which I already spoiled in the previous paragraph).
- taneq 11y agoI believe the story you're referring to is called "Rabbit". They solved that one by forcing a situation which triggered the first law, breaking the deadlock. :)
- daveloyall 11y agoHm, no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_That_Rabbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_That_Rabbit Found the one I was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaround_%28story%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaround_%28story%29 It's interesting that I remember the story incorrectly.
- taneq 11y agoBah, that'll teach me to post when I'm half asleep. At least I remembered the end rightly (ish). Clearly it's time for me to re-read his early robot anthologies.