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this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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I, robot.
Asimov: "The 'robots take over the world' plot is overdone. I think humans would make robots intrinsically safe through these three laws."
Movie: "What if the robots interpreted the three laws in such a way that they decided to take over the world??!?"
The only good part of that movie was when Will Smith's sidekick was like "this thing runs on gasoline! Don't you know gasoline explodes?!"
A running theme of Asimov's Robot stories is that the Three Laws are inadequate. Robots that aren't smart and insightful enough keep melting down their positronic brains when they reach contradictions or are placed in irreconcilable situations. Eventually Daneel and Giskard come up with the Zeroth Law; and if I recall correctly they only manage that because Daneel is humaniform and Giskard is telepathic.
spoiler
And the robots do take over, eventually!There were flaws, yes, but they never rose to the level of attempting to destroy humanity that I recall. We had a sort of plot armor in that Asimov wasn’t interested in writing that kind of story.
I’m getting this from a forward he wrote for one of the robot book compilations.
Oh, sure, the robots never want to destroy and replace humanity, but they do end up taking quite a lot of control of humanity's future.
Wasn’t the last I, Robot story about how the robots directly the world’s politics decide that we were living better and longer lives without technology and brought the world back to medieval level of tech?
Wasn't there books that he wrote that were about flaws in the Three Laws?
Flaws or interesting interpretations of them, but he rarely if ever approached the “robots destroy humanity” trope even if it was technically possible in his universe because he thought it was boring.
Yeah it’s more about whatever safe guards you put life will find a way to twist them.
Life, uh, finds a way
Are you saying the book does not have a blatant commercial for All Stars?
Imagine if they did an anthology series... /drooling
For now I've got Pluto to look forward to.
Pluto? I never finished reading the manga, but it was looking promising. Is there a movie made or coming up?
There's a Netflix anime getting made!
Oh oh interesting interesting!
... should I finish reading it first...?
It's a great story, but that's up to you! I ended up reading scanlations of it years ago.
I was so disappointed I just forgot of its existence until now.
I thought for sure this would be the top comment.
I don't know what you're talking about, there has never been a movie adaptation of the book! Never!
In fact, there hasn't. It was an original script called Hardwired with an Asimovian paint job.
Ah, the Starship Troopers effect.
Yup. However I'd say ST succeeded and IR failed miserably.
ST didn't succeed in it's day, it just retroactively got a cult following from people who didn't read the book.
And it didn't succeed at showing the only part of the book that mattered, power armored space marines with shoulder nuke launchers!
If it was a good criticism of Heinlein's weirdo militarism it'd have been another thing, but the most damning criticisms of it are made up because Verhoeven couldn't be bothered to finish reading a short novel.
See the thing is that Heinlein wrote about a lot of different societies, some of which are completely antithetical to the militaristic selective democracy in ST.
People often say "oh this author thinks this or that" but if multiple of their works contradict how can you tell what is and isn't their personal views?
That being said, yeah most of what Verhoeven "criticized" wasn't even in the novel, there was no propaganda because they didn't actually want people to enlist lol if only he'd made it to the second chapter where the anti-recruiter gave his spiel about the military industrial complex and it's continuing growth due to the benefits tied to service...
I think Heinlein was actually much more against militarism than people give him credit for, hell he wrote "if this goes on-" about half a century before the problem became acute, he saw the religious authoritarianism from the US right wing coming miles away. I can't imagine he wasn't also critiquing our GI bill system of service for education, and the increasing dependency of military contractors on our economy with the novel.
Was RAH a weird dude? Absolutely. I think people are too quick to judge his personal values and beliefs based on one novel out of dozens of conflicting ideologies. Hell go read "beyond this horizon", the good guys are communists and run an automated economy with no standing army lol try and make that fit with the society of Troopers.
Starship Troopers is a bit different in that most critics agree it was Heinlein describing his own thoughts on the matter, particularly because he was angry about Eisenhower's suspension of nuclear testing.
I agree you should be careful about conflating a depicted society with the author's personal beliefs though, especially for an author who has such a long career and clearly changed his views during it.
The ending of The Puppet Masters describes a war against the aliens' world that seems taken from Starship Troopers. It seems a recurring idea for Heinlein.
Heinlein was horrified by Soviet Communism (and he'd traveled in the Soviet Union). He believed the US nuclear program (and space program) were a necessary protection against people like Stalin and Mao taking over the world.
There's a running theme in a number of his works, of people trying to find a society and a place in it where they can live safely, where they won't be oppressed for disagreeing with that society. It shows up in Stranger in a Strange Land, in "If This Goes On—", in the Lazarus Long stories, etc.
I think Heinlein's militarist liberal Americanism was contextual: he saw America as a place where a weirdo like him had a chance to live in peace, and that made it worth defending.