I went to see I, Robot last night. I am a huge Isaac Asimov fan so naturally I was worried. Asimov was a thinking person’s writer who was always more interested in exploring ideas than in writing about a lot of sex and violence. Hollywood is if course big into sex and violence in movies. So what would they do with I, Robot I wondered. Well the good news is that they did a great job with it.
I was encouraged when I heard that Will Smith was going to be in the movie. He is also an executive producer so he must have had some control over things. Will Smith in case you do not know it is a geek. By that I mean he is a fan and user of technology. So that is a point in his favor for a movie like this one. Plus he is a very good actor. I was concerned about the woman who was to play Dr. Susan Calvin. Dr. Calvin in the robot books is not a “hot chick” but a serious scientist who is more interested in robots than people. But the actor they picked did a great job I thought.
I don’t know how many of you have read I, Robot (which is actually a collection of short stories) or any of Asimov’s other robot books. If you haven’t read them go do so. [I’ll wait. J ] But seriously if you are a computer scientist or interested in robots you need to read them.
The theme of I, Robot is similar in some ways to themes in The Matrix or Terminator movies. Man against machine, humanity against inhumanity, and the question “is man creating the seeds of its own destruction in creating ‘thinking machines?’” The difference between those movies and this one is that the inventors of Asimov’s robots are smarter than the people who invented the robots in those other movies. Asimov’s robots have hard-wired into their systems the Three Laws of Robotics. Briefly:
- A robot may not harm a human or through inaction allow a human to come to harm.
- A robot must obey orders give by a human unless the order violates the first law.
- A robot must protect itself as long as doing so does not violate the first or second law.
Problems develop when robots start interpreting the laws in unexpected ways. In this movie it appears that a robot has been created that can, and does, choose to violate the first law. Will Smith, whose character hates robots, decides that a robot has killed a robot engineer while everyone else believes it was a suicide. It gets complicated from there.
The screenwriters seem to really have understood the Three Laws and the sort of issues Asimov wrote about. I would say that the robots in the movie are a little rougher than Asimov would have written it. And Will Smith has an easier time fighting robots than is reasonable. But those are nits. This is not quite the think piece that an Asimov book is but it is probably as much of one as the average movie goers can handle. I hope the movie is a huge success so that Hollywood will make more robot movies based on Asimov’s books.
Also posted in the Message Boards in case anyone wants to discuss the movie in more detail.