The Bipolar Otaku

I guess it's about time I bitch about I, Robot. Be warned, spoilers abound. But then again, I thought it was hugely predicatable after about 8 minutes of the movie.

The movie was very loosely based upon a book of short stories by Isaac Asimov, who coined the word robotics and created the Three Laws of Robotics, which are:
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 orders given 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.

The plot, basically, is that a top scientist at US Robotics apparently commits suicide. A detective, who once was a cybernetic patient of this scientist and who deeply distrusts, robots because of their cold, analytical determination of good from bad, explores this suicide and decides he must have been murdered by a robot found in the scientist's lab. But how can a robot with the Three Laws commit murder? As the plot unfolds, we discover that the next generation of robots is being sent out to kill the detective because he is learning too much. It ends up that a super-robot mastermind brain, who has been running the city peaceably for several years, has determined that humans are a menace to themselves and that the most efficient way to protect them is to cage them up, and is using the new robots (with the new wireless uplink feature) to destroy anyone who gets in its way. Riots ensue, naturally, but the people on the streets are no match. Of course, the robot from the lab, the detective, and another US Robotics scientist manage to shut it down, the end.

Some critics whine about the cliche-ness of Will Smith's detective and the cliche-ness of Bridget Moynahan's cold and uptight but beautiful scientist who ends up melting at cliche-ed detective's hands. My complaint is about what they've done to Asimov's robots. In an NPR interview with Asimov, some 12 years ago while he was still alive, he talked about how his Three Laws transformed the use of robots in science fiction almost overnight. Before he started writing short stories, the norm for robots was that they were tomorrow's Frankensteins, that these menaces would get out of control and start killing people. Afterwards, almost all sci-fi writers took it as a given that robots would be programmed to not be able to do harm. So, without anyone giving credit to Asimov, his Three Laws tamed all robots from then on. The closest implication that his robots could do harm was in a short story in I, Robot, where an economic mastermind robot started putting small companies out of business because they were, on the side, repeatedly undermining that robots ability to do its job.

But now this movie comes out. VIKI (the USR mastermind) smells awfully like Terminator's Skynet, in spirit, in motive, in logic, and in control. Robots are evil again, out of human control again, back to being mechanical Frankensteins. Sure, maybe the Three Laws might be inherently flawed, but it still seems that the movie crushes the spirit of the author. That is my rant; let it be heard.