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I, Robot Hits the Theaters
I, Robot: A Movie Review that's 3 Laws (and Spoiler) Safe!
A movie review by Rob Carr
Thanks to Eide's Entertainment I got to see I, Robot tonight. As someone who grew up with Isaac Asimov's robot stories, I've come to expect a mystery based on the implications of the 3 Laws of Robotics (or the lack of one or part of one of those laws), the "Frankenstein Complex," and Dr. Susan Calvin. I was afraid that the movie might miss out on this, especially since it's not a direct adaptation of the book, but "inspired" by the Good Doctor Asimov.
The movie met my expectations and more. Will Smith, whom we all know as an overconfident smart@$$ character from such movies as "Independence Day" and the two "Men in Black" movies, played a somewhat less confident and far less wisecracking character. It was a welcome change to see him less confident. Yeah, some of the stunts were a little absurd (am I the only one thinking of Gemini 8 at one point in the movie?) but that's to be expected from this type of movie. Bridget Moynahan was far too young to be the Susan Calvin I remember, but that's also to be expected in this type of movie. James Cromwell (whom you'll all remember from Star Trek: First Contact and Enterprise's "Broken Bow" episode as Dr. Zefram Cochrane) gave a flat performance - but that's actually a complement. I doubt anyone will recognize Wash from "Firefly" as an important robot in the story.
It's customary to comment on how well the CGI was done. I liked it, but then again, I'm not hypercritical on something like that. I did wonder a little bit about center of balance as some of the robots walked, but mostly I didn't think about it at all, which to me is the goal of CGI. I did wonder about children's fingers getting caught in some of the open gaps on the robot's bodies. Real world models would have a bit more covering, one would think. But that's being picky.
I have no memory of the soundtrack music. That in and of itself might say something. I'm a musician, but it just didn't register.
I figured out some clues, missed some others, and was surprised several times in the movie. There were a lot of clues - this isn't one of those mysteries where the answer is pulled out of the writer's a...out of thin air.
I'm not a complete continuity freak, so I can't tell if the movie violated any of Asimov's universe, but from what I can remember, it fits pretty well (if you ignore Dr. Calvin's age) and might even explain a few things.
Given that even some of the geeks in the audience were surprised to find out that there was a book of stories just like the movie, I think the movie will hopefully bring Asimov's stories to a new generation.
I liked "I, Robot. It's worth seeing, especially if you 've already seen Spider-Man 2 at least once. It's a pretty good (though not great) movie.
Having read Slashdot for a while, I know that there are folks out there who will despise this movie because it's not exactly like the book. Others will hate the movie or worship it, and loads of people are going to savage this review. You know what? That's fine with me. I had fun with this movie, had a nice date with my wife, and it didn't cost anything. I even had fun typing up this review. You're allowed to be different and to agree or disagree with me. Heck, that's a big chunk of what makes the world fun. Interestingly, it's even a small point in the movie. I'd say more, but that would be telling."
This is the story that showed me the complete folly of the three laws: The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Asimov wrote about a hundred stories exploring different ways in which these three laws could lead to interesting/dangerous situations. I think Asimov was doing all he could to make it clear that these three laws were not perfect.
Why don't you people read some of the other stuff Asimov wrote? The End of Eternity is a perfect example of a non-robot work of his that was engaging, entertaining, and thought provoking. Does it ever get a mention? No! Because 99.9% of people think of Asimov as "The robot guy."
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I just want to see it for some feel-good rap music. I hope I'm not let down.
We cannot even make software now which is safe from low level, machine representable things like buffer overruns.
The "Three Laws Safe" idea is crap. We are talking about software systems, which are buggy, incomplete, and able to do things the creators never imagined. What makes us think we can all the sudden implement three very high order rules in a manner which is completely foolproof?
Please bid on this Karmann Ghia! Please pleas
I'm sure it will be a fun watch (I'm seeing it this afternoon) but sometimes it would be nice to watch a film that was as stimulating as the book (LoTR was one) and not just 2 hours of fun.
But I'm pretty sure I'm going to be called elitist
that the much promised "Willenium" is finally upon us?
That makes it a perfect fit, since Asimov himself was not a complete continuity freak and was not concerned if one of his stories violated incidental issues in any of his previous stories. (He quoted Emerson "A foolish consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds.".)
I was making a point about the beating this type of work takes when it gets to Hollywood. You think Heinlein wouldn't hurl seeing Strship Troopers? The lack of respect stretches from the original work to the end consumers intelligence. I am frequently mystified as to why movie studios feel these stories (ST as a prime example) are not mass market ready as they are.
Doubtfull. Nowhere in the preview did I see the word "Asimov." Sure, it might have been in the tiny text that the show and the end of the preview for 1.5 seconds, but I doubt that's going to get anybody into the bookstores that didn't already know of Asimov. You'd think that they'd title it "Isaac Asimov's 'I, Robot'" as a selling point.
Roger Ebert gives it a measly two stars and, for the ./ crowd, bashes MS Word at the end of the review.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
What I hate even more is when great movies are quickly rushed to print to coincide with their theatrical release.
Imagine my disappointment when I saw that some guy named JR translated the fine on-screen presentations of Lord of the Rings into trashy paperbacks!
It is not about programming the rules, Asimov's short stories are about studying the consequences of these ethical rules. Ethical rules are commonly studied based con case studies, real of fictional. If you think the idea is about implementing the rules, you are totally missing the point.
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
Non-spoiler excerpts:
"I, ROBOT started out as a spec script from then-unknown writer Jeff Vintar titled HARDWIRED. ... Proyas was signed and the project began to get a head of steam.
"Shortly thereafter, Fox acquired the rights to the I, ROBOT series (and eventually also Asimov's other classic, "The Foundation") and decided to take Vintar's script and incorporate many of the ideas from Asimov's book..."
"...Around late 2002/early 2003, Academy Award-winner Akiva Goldsman was brought in, along with INSOMNIA writer Hilary Seitz, for a polish, making the transition from HARDWIRED to I, ROBOT complete."
SPOILERS in the article!
The Bottom of Things by Michael Sampson
Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.
Has anybody who has seen the movie ALSO read the script that IASFM printed back in 1984? IIRC, the script, written by Harlan Ellison (possible spoilers, I don't know, I haven't seen the movie which is why I'm asking) was completely unlike the book in it's major plot line, which was a reporter interviewing a relatively old Susan Calvin about her memories of being young and working with the great Michael Donovan at US Robots and Mechanical Men. I also seem to remember that Harlan's script cut out a number of my more favorite short stories from the book- though Robbie and Liar were still there. Like I said, it's been many years since I read the script- but is this a fair synopsis of the movie's plotline, or is it completely different?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Why yes, I am a dork. How did you guess?
The original editor of Astounding Science Fiction Magazine (back in the 1930s, when a young teenage Issac Asimov was first writing) had this order to his universe: White Americans, Americans, Other Humans, Robots built by humans, machines built by humans, Alien races, Machines built by Alien Races. That order is a "who is smarter than whom" and "who wins/outsmarts/kills whom" guide for getting a story in to this editor. If the proper people didn't win, the story was rejected. (I'm not trying to hide the name of the editor, I'm really pulling a brain fart right now on his name, though he was editor for a large number of years and had quite a bit of influence on the works of Heinlien and Bradbury as well as Asimov and other notables of the time).
This is the reason why IA came up with the three laws to begin with (Robots always subservient to Humans) and why the Robot/Empire/Foundation universe has no aliens at all (though a later short story in the Empire period had a single alien species, they were busy dying out, and the humans were clearly in ascendancy galaxy wide, and it took a kind human tricking the system to save that species and send them into exile to another galaxy). CAMPBELL! That was his name, CAMPBELL! I think. Not real sure, but it's was connected to at least one of those memes.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I think that's a little overblown, especially since we don't know what an AI would look like.
Have you ever read "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter? In it he raises the interesting thought that AI will actually be located somewhere in a mass of software and that the "entity" will have no control over its lower level functions, in the same way that you are sentient but cannot will any particular neuron to fire. Rather, your sentience somehow congeals out of the neural activity, and the sentience of an AI would probably congeal out of complex software functioning.
So it's entirely possible that an AI might not be any smarter than a person, and also quite likely that AIs would have to learn, just like people do (i.e., no "memory dumps" from parents). Machines may very well revolt someday, but giving them superhuman attributes before ever seeing one is a bit paranoid.
Scientist: How much time do we have professor?
Frink: Well according to my calculations, the robots won't go berserk for at least 24 hours.
(The robots go berserk.)
Frink: Oh, I forgot to er, carry the one.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
Not only that, but he put a bunch of extra crap that wasn't in the movies. Tom Bombadil? What the hell was up with that?
And he totally dissed Liv Tyler's character. She should sue. The nerve of some people...
I also heard the novelization of "The Passion of the Christ" came in 4 slightly different versions by different authors. That's just wacky.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Asimov invented the "three laws" specifically to deal with the absurd number of "robots going out of control" books, pointing out that human beings wouldn't be stupid enough to create a unit they can't control, and would want to put something in them, say, a set of laws built into their circuitry that cannot be overridden.
Asimov's "I, Robot" was not about robots going out of control, it was about the limitations robots would have given they'd have to apply these laws to every decision they make. It was, in short, the EXACT OPPOSITE of what this movie, assuming trailers reflect it correctly, is about.
If anyone is able to re-animate Asimov's corpse, they better frickin' program the three laws of robotics into him. Because otherwise the Good Doctor will be Will Smith's worst enemy...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
1. Serve The Public Trust
2. Protect The Innocent
3. Uphold The Law
Those who complain about affect & effect on
The first law's still paramount, of course. Having the robot crash and freeze up was considered a less severe bug than having it move unexpectedly, or in an unexpected way. Such an unpredictable motion had a much greater chance of hurting someone than a simple freeze.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics (latter amended to include a necessary Zeroth Law) existed to create the classic locked room murder mystery (i.e. the dead body is alone in a locked room that could have only been locked from the inside -- so how was he murdered?).
After creating his supposedly nothing-can-go-wrong infallible set of rules, he proceeded to show their flaws in virtually every story he wrote about robots afterwards. As long as people believed that his Three Laws guaranteed safe robots, his writing career was assured.
(Well almost assured. Even he couldn't save himself from what I Robot has become, given that it's based on his book - which goes to show that truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense!)
So we ended up with a fascinatingly entertaining set of stories many of us have enjoyed, a couple attempts at movies of them (don't forget The Bicentennial Man), and Dr. Asimov's legacy as a Science Fiction Grand Master is secure for at least our lifetimes.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Although Asimov did try to write stories about robots being used to serve humanity and not to destroy it, and created the 3 laws with the idea that anyone intelligent enough to make a robot would build some failsafe in its programming, he spent most of his stories talking about how the laws could be circumvented, to point out their imperfections and the fact that even his "3 laws" were extremely imperfect and riddled with problems.
*********SPOILERS*********** for anyone who hasn't read Asimov.
Take the Robot novels for example. Caves of Steel, Naked Sun, Robots of Dawn, and Robots and Empire. In all of them except for Dawn, robots work towards the death or destruction of human beings. In Caves, a robot transported the weapon that served in a murder. In Nake sun, a robot with detachable limbs gave its arm to a woman with which she bludgered her husband. In Empire, a Solarian robot tries to kill a human being because her definition of such a being depends on his accent.
All the time, the laws are broken, warped, and shown to be less than perfect. That's not to say that they are useless, only that they have limits and problems.
And I'm not even getting into the matter of the consequences of societies including such robots and the evolution and survivability of such societies.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
The problem with this reasoning, however, is that it assumes that because the law itself is simply stated, that the definitions of the words it contains are equally simple. That reasoning does not follow logically from the premise. The definition of "harm", for example, is vast... and to restrain human beings from performing in their daily capacity what would otherwise be normal and proper behaviour would arguably be causing _actual_ harm to the people that the robot was caring for. Therefore, the robot must make a decision, based on the overall level of harm that is done in connecction with the probability that the harm would actually happen. Thus, an action that actually induces negative psychological damage (not theoretically, but actually probable damage) would be less preferable to one that may or may not cause real physical damage, especially if the latter would be necessary for performing in their ordinary daily capacity, since denying a human being their freedom and rights of self-determination is inarguably psychologically damaging. The weights of the damages caused must be factored in with the ability for the human beings involved to recover from those damages, and the robot would have to make a choice that would result in the smallest overall level of harm being caused to humans in general, with harm to the general welfare of humanity being weighted in slightly favour to that of any particular human being, so that, for example, a robot could inform the police of a robbery, even though doing that would likely mean that the thief would go through suffering as part of the excercise of justice (that is, his freedoms are revoked, he goes to jail, possibly gets subjected to harsh treatment, etc). This doesn't make it too fuzzy, however... the robot would allow human beings to come to harm only to the extent that it was essential for the human society to continue to function normally simply because to stop society from functioning normally would actually cause much greater long-term harm.
There are similar rationales for the other two laws. Asimov was no dummy.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'