I, Robot

Honestly, this was unexpectedly enjoyable for me. I've never much been into sci-fi but recently have been getting into it because I've realised that some works of sci-fi can be really thought-provoking and raising some interesting questions that are becoming increasingly relevant to the current times we live in. I, Robot definitely fits well into that category. It's nothing short of amazing that this was written more than half a century ago in 1950 (for context, that's at least 7 years before the first spacecraft, Sputnik 1, was launched by the USSR), yet it raises so many questions about burgeoning AI that has only gotten more relevant today, 70 years after the book was published.

The premise of the book follows a reporter who is interviewing an elderly scientist, Dr Susan Calvin, a leader and expert in her field of robopsychology. Each chapter is a short story from different eras of Dr Calvin's life, from her teenage years when the first robots were being commercially sold as non-speaking babysitters to the end of her career where Machines are literally controlling the global economy. For me, every story starts off a little hazily and blurred with technical jargon, but very quickly we see the interesting question of the story - what happens when a robot is assembled in a space station far from Earth and only regards Earth as an abstract concept? What happens when the First Law of Robotics, that a robot should never harm humans, is modified to achieve commercial gain? What happens when we create a robot that's indistinguishable from humans?

I was a little afraid when I started this one because the beginning of the second story felt very stale and technical to me (one of the reasons why I avoided sci-fi for a long time), but I was pleasantly surprised pretty quickly. (Almost) every single story sucked me in. When I started on the next story, I usually had to finish it before I could put the book down. The dilemmas and the questions each story poses with robots were just so fascinating and so thought-provoking, and also presented in such an engaging way.

All the stories were very memorable but I think the standout one for me was “Reason”, with the premise it creates. Two astronauts assemble a robot on site in their space station to help with the running of it, but the robot ends up being so intelligent that it not only questions the existence of Earth and space itself, thinking them to be just delusions on the astronauts' parts. It develops a religious mania, insisting that it is a mysterious “Maker” directing the astronauts' actions and purposes, and now that the astronauts have outlived their usefulness, it is now up to the robot to step up and be the Maker's prophet. More shockingly, it also disbelieves that the astronauts could've built them in the first place, because it, perhaps correctly, assesses human beings as being vastly inferior to robots in every way, and therefore it is impossible that an inferior entity could have constructed another entity superior to itself. The robot is so convincing that the astronauts actually start questioning themselves and second-guessing the existence of Earth.

Anyway, whether you like sci-fi or not, as long as you like thought-provoking speculative fiction or even just admiring how prophetic a book could be from 70 years ago, this is definitely one I'd recommend anyone to read. It's incredibly short and in such bite-sized pieces that it's also easy to breeze through.