|
|
|
|
|
|
can't be asked to "find out what's wrong." The story is even more meaningful today, when almost everyone has had experience with the exactness with which computer commands must be typed. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
"Lenny," Infinity, January 1958, begins with a child accidentally inserting random programming into a new LNE ("Lenny") model. Lenny turns out to behave like an infant. Susan Calvin says that Lenny has great promise because it is teachable, but it raises First Law fears when it breaks an employee's arm trying to ward off a blow, as it turns out. Susan protects Lenny, pointing out that the robot did not know its own strength and could not yet differentiate between good and evil. Moreover, it will help to solve the problem of getting young people interested in robotics by adding the spice of danger. Perhaps more important, she feels motherly "toward the only kind of baby she could ever have or love." |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
"Galley Slave," Galaxy, December 1957, takes up the problem of mental drudgery. USR introduces a proofreading robot, EZ-27 ("Easy"). A few months later Professor Simon Ninheimer, opposed to the idea of leasing Easy at the beginning, sues USR because Easy inserted embarrassing mistakes into Ninheimer's new book. Easy has a block against talking about the problem. The robot is brought into the courtroom as Ninheimer is describing how badly his reputation has been injured by Easy's action, and Easy rises to speak. Ninheimer shouts that it has been told to remain silent. Easy was about to take all the blame upon itself. Ninheimer's motivation was not simply hatred of robots but an effort to keep creative scholarship from being taken over by robots. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The remainder of the robot stories are scattered throughout seven different collections of short stories. All were written and published after 1956. Two of them, in which robots play a less central role than in any of the previous stories, were reprinted in Asimov's collection of stories Earth Is Room Enough in 1957. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
"Jokester," Infinity, December 1956, deals with Multivac, Asimov's all-purpose computer (named, by analogy, after the early computer called Univac). Grand Masters, the only persons capable of comprehending the functions of the giant computer and of asking the meaningful questions, the scarcity of which had created a bottleneck in dealing with Multivac, are permitted great latitude. One of them, Meyerhoff, who has a reputation as a jokester, begins telling jokes to Multivac in an effort to discover who originates such jokes. Multivac ultimately reveals that jokes are placed in selected human minds by extraterrestrials who use them to study human psychology. Once the origin of jokes is |
|
|
|
|
|