For what it’s worth, by the way, a Three Laws robot can’t be stolen by just telling it “come with me”. It would already have been ordered by its owner “Don’t go with just anyone who asks”, and the robot would then have two conflicting orders. Conflicting orders are resolved, in part, by who has the greater authority to give that robot orders.
Of course, you could still get such a robot to come with you by convincing it that lives were at stake, such that the First Law would override the Second. But then, once it either saved the lives or discovered that you were bluffing about them, it would go right back to its master, as per its more-authorized legitimate orders.
The three laws were extended to their true logical end in The Humaniods series, and to a lesser extent, Norman in Mudd’s Women.
The first law states that a robot may not harm a human, or through inaction allow harm to come to them. It’s the second part that’s the problem. “Allowing harm through inaction” doesn’t just mean not letting a car hit a human. What if there is a gun in a room with a human? Well, he might use it on himself. Therefore it must be removed. Same with knives. But you know, that large potted plant might fall over and hurt someone. Better take it away, too. Hammers can drop on your toe, sewing needles can stick you in the finger, that bump in the carpet can cause you to trip, maybe get a bruise.
Next thing you know, you can’t move without a robot preventing you from doing so. Can’t go outside - could get skin cancer. Maybe a meteor might fall froim the sky and hit you.
The Humanoids series was the scary side of the first law. And the Humanoids always “won”. Humanity lost all free will, and there was nothing they could do about it. By the end, even bad thoughts and heartbreak and sadness were “harms” that the Humanoids had to protect us from. It was one of the scariest series I’ve read.
Everyone worries about robots going berserk and killing us - no one but Jack Williamson worried that they might protect us too much!
Asimov mentioned his error in the introduction to the first edition (and every other edition, AFAIK) of the novel. He misspoke the isotope number, someone joked about it, and he decided to write the novel based on it.
I haven’t read the whole series but didn’t it turn out in the end that it was part of a very long-term plan to save humanity from some threat and the safety-obsession was a regrettable necessity in the meantime?
Still, the series as originally conceived presents a terrifying idea: what if an artificial intelligence was super-intelligent, yet imbecilically devoted to an absurd idea due to misprogramming?
A fascinating variant on this was all the rage a hundred years ago.
H. C. Greening, a well-known comic strip artist, introduced *Percy *in 1911. Percy was a robot, with rows on his buttons on his back, each programmed to do a specific task. Whatever Percy did he did perfectly. At first. Then he kept doing it to anything and everything in sight, leaving behind shambles. One gag, but a good one. It ran for 67 Sundays. For a decade Percy was America’s most famous robot, although always called a mechanical man until R.U.R. retroactively changed the term. It was still being used when Asimov started writing, probably why he called his company U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men without ever providing a distinction. There wasn’t. They were perfectly synonymous, like cars and autos.
I’ve collected all the Percy strips for the first time ever, on my website at Percy: Comics’ First Robot. Guaranteed to be lots of stuff there you never knew.
Looking back over this thread, I see I can add another bit you never knew about. Every oldtimer in SF knows about Cleve Cartmill’s “Deadline” and the FBI investigation it caused. The very same FBI agents also investigated another book and for much better reason. The book talked about atomic research being done in the U.S. by the very real National Defense Research Committee, headed by Dr. Constant, a thin disguise for the real world Henry Conant. The author knows about the destructiveness of an atom bomb and says forthrightly that all the cyclotrons were taken over by the government to find ways to release uranium’s energy. And that the Nazi’s were doing the same.
The book is The Last Secret by Dana Chambers, a pseudonym for Albert Fear Leffingwell. It’s a mystery thriller, so far outside of the SF world that it didn’t become an insiders’ tale to be passed along the generations. The FBI had less of a struggle than with Cartmill to figure out where Chambers was getting this super-secret info: he lifted it almost word-for-word out of prewar New York Times articles. All the agent could do was tell his publisher not to reprint the 1943 book. Campbell may have folded, but Dial Press sold the reprint rights to two separate paperbacks houses by 1945. It’s a great story, better than the one actually in the book.
Reminds me of another short story (not about robots), the name and author of which I’ve forgotten. A man uses a time machine to go back and, at key turning points, nudge humanity towards a calm, peaceful, low-tech agricultural existence (including IIRC giving Napoleon an aneurism as a teen), which to him is the ideal. At last the time-traveler’s work is done, and he returns to a future Earth in which everyone lives in placid little villages, and is very happy. The last sentence of the story is something like, “Of course, when the battlecruisers of the cruel and rapacious Ghe’ndi race took up their orbits a week later, Earth was utterly unprepared to resist them.”
Elendil’s Heir: Another story with almost exactly the opposite plot is “Who Needs Insurance” by Robin S. Scott. It’s a brilliant little tale, and, really, the genius of it is the telling, not the “idea” or the revelation. You could cut out the last page entirely, and still enjoy the story as a damn fine story.
It’s collected in Nebula Award Stories #2, itself one of the finest anthologies in the history of SF, also containing such brilliant works as “The Last Castle” by Jack Vance (arguably his “masterpiece” work,) and “Among The Hairy Earthmen” by R.A. Lafferty, one of the quirkiest pieces of revisionist history you’ll ever encounter, both hilarious and terrifying.
Highest possible recommendation: anyone who loves SF can not do better than to read this book.