(urth) Robots

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes]

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