Re:How accurately did science fiction stories predict AI?
by ajb on Friday November 06, 2026 @04:32AM
(#50390176)
Well, it is a very long time since I read Asimov himself. I may be over-indexing on the Roger McBride Allen authorised series, which portrayed robots as attempting art, but not really succeeding as being creative.
But I thought in the lying thing Daneel was unusual in succeeding.
Re:How accurately did science fiction stories predict AI?
by vlovich123 on Friday November 06, 2026 @10:35AM
(#50393607)
Lying was uncommon in the sense that Asimov only had a few such stories. I don’t recall if it was treated as a complete anomaly or happens sometimes.
Liar!: robot can read minds due to manufacturing defect, realizes words can cause harm to humans and starts lying because of the first law.
Mirror image: robot lies to protect master’s reputation
Risk: perception of robot lying although in reality it followed instructions too literally
Little lost robot: weakened first law robot engages in malicious compliance.
So quite a few stories
I don’t recall his robots having problems with creativity nor lying - precisely Daniel in the post-Foundation books was found to have developed a zeroth law which he used not only to lie but also to creatively get the universe back on Seldon’s plan after the Mule disrupted it. There were also stories in the robot/Spacer era pre-Foundation where robots lied precisely because they had to to save a human life or themselves. And the robots were creative - the human inspector those series followed relied on the creativity of his robot companion to help him.