At Mental Floss Wallace tagged ten thought-provoking novels and novellas about AI, including:
Read about the other entries on the list.I, Robot // Isaac Asimov
When it comes to fiction about artificial intelligence, Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) is foundational. The collection of short stories popularized the Three Laws of Robotics, a concept that Asimov first explicitly introduced in his 1942 short story “Runaround” (which is featured in I, Robot). The laws are simple: an artificially intelligent robot cannot harm humans, either through action or inaction; it must obey humans (unless that conflicts with the first rule); and it cannot harm itself (unless that conflicts with the previous rules).
“I have my answer ready whenever someone asks me if I think that my Three Laws of Robotics will actually be used to govern the behavior of robots, once they become versatile and flexible enough to be able to choose among different courses of behavior,” Asimov wrote in a 1981 issue of Compute! The Journal for Progressive Computing. “My answer is, ‘Yes, the Three Laws are the only way in which rational human beings can deal with robots—or with anything else.’ —But when I say that, I always remember (sadly) that human beings are not always rational.”
Asimov’s laws are often discussed in conversations about the real-world ethics of AI. But although they’re a good starting point, the laws are far from perfect—as Asimov himself was aware: I, Robot explores just a few of the different ways in which they could fail. For instance, in “Liar!,” a robot lies to humans to avoid emotionally harming them, but it becomes trapped in a paralyzing paradox when it finds out that the lies themselves also cause pain.
I, Robot is among KT Tunstall's six best books and Matt Haig's ten top fictional robots. Susan Calvin from I, Robot is on io9's list of the ten greatest (fictional) female scientists.
--Marshal Zeringue
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