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nearby planet named Nexon (two parsecs or 6.52 light-years away), is fertile, temperate, and without dangerous animals. The settlers, who had felt cramped on Nexon as its population approached two million and a limitation was placed on the number of robots (robot birth control), resolved to limit human population on Solaria to what they considered the optimum number of 20,000 and allow the robot population to grow unrestricted.
The consequence of huge estates, cheap labor, and trimensic viewing was the absence of cities. Solarians had fewer and fewer reasons for personal contact and gradually developed a pride in never seeing anyone directly, which eventually became a neurosis about seeing anyone. Human population is limited by assigning mates according to genetic considerations (some Solarians wear gene-coded rings). Children are licensed according to population needs and gene charts, then removed as month-old fetuses and brought to term in tanks. Some fifteen to twenty of them are received each month at what is called "the farm" and about the same number are graduated to independence after a lengthy period of education and training. They are raised by robots with human supervision and taught, in spite of their instincts for gregariousness, to prefer isolation to grow up, that is, into proper Solarians who can barely permit personal contact with their own mates.
This world allowed Asimov to play with two separate notions: the social customs of the Solarians and a further elaboration of robotics. Because Solarians do not like, and sometimes cannot endure, contact with other humans, they must learn to work with robots, and they have developed an unusual skill at it. They use robots to tend to the children (Solarians can scarcely bring themselves to touch, or even to mention, "the little animals"). Dr. Delmarre had even developed the ability to instruct a robot to spank a child, an action that could ruin a robot's positronic brain. Baley learns from Jothan Leebig the difficulties of building a robot capable of disciplining children. Baley suggests that throughout history the First Law of Robotics has been misquoted. It should read: "A robot may do nothing that, to its knowledge, will harm a human being, nor, through inaction, knowingly allow a human being to come to harm." The novel explores, as well, ways of using a robot to commit murder: instructing one robot to put poison into water and another to give it to a human; instructing a robot to hand a child a poisoned arrow; and instructing a robot to hand a woman its arm to use as a club when she is overwrought. In one episode, Baley orders Daneel to reveal himself as a robot to the other household robots so that Daneel will not interfere with Baley's plan, which Daneel thinks is too

 
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