Robots

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 28 Mar 2012, 17:11 · from 2012-March.txt.gz

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From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2012 10:11:01 -0700
Subject: (urth) Robots
Message-ID: <CAJ8=rtjXV9YcmTQREe+x-5=RqUMh911zrBnjQ=WKxSGC6V2iVA at mail.gmail.com>

David Stockhoff wrote:

> Without having read the story (though I will), I want to comment that the
> "moral robot" has been around at least since Asimov's "3 laws," which
> basically hardwired robots to be MORE moral than humans.  Naturally they
> represent the kind of rational and dispassionate morality that we humans,
> for a few hundred years at least, were imagined to aspire to.

More to the point, the Three Laws of Robotics are designed to make
Asimovian robots the perfect slaves, and thus a coded way of talking
about the situation of minority persons in general and blacks in particular
at a time when you couldn't openly talk about that stuff in popular fiction.
(If you have any doubt about this, note how hostile humans refer to a
robot as "boy.") Reading Asimov's early robot stories with this in mind
opens a whole world of social commentary right there on the surface.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

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