Science fiction is one of those youthful passions you never quite get over, just as you can never forget, once you learn them, Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.
I was reminded again of that passion, and those laws, while watching Alex Proyas' "I, Robot," starring Will Smith. It's another spectacular CGI-drenched action saga with a familiar plot line -- rebellious cop battles seemingly omnipotent bad guys. But though it's nominally based on a science-fiction mainstay, Asimov's 1950 short-story collection "I, Robot," little of the original is left.
What's kept, though, is crucial: the laws and the idea that robots must be governed by technological morality, that science is beneficent under most circumstances but can occasionally turn destructive.
In the movie, Smith -- with all his hip-hop charm and megastar impudence -- plays "Dirty Harry" with a taste for Stevie Wonder: Del Spooner, a robot-hating homicide cop in vintage Converse shoes, investigating, in 2035 Chicago, a mysterious death that may have been an impossible crime.
The death of scientist Albert Lanning (James Cromwell) may be murder by a robot, Sunny (Alan Tudyk), committed despite the fact that robots are programmed never to harm humans.
That program is Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics: One, a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm. Two, a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except when such orders would conflict with the first law. Three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law.
Asimov's original robot stories were written in the 1940s and published by the much-revered but sometimes maddeningly contentious editor John W. Campbell Jr. in his magazine Astounding Science Fiction. (They were later collected as a continuous chronicle in the book "I, Robot.") It was Campbell, according to Asimov, who first formulated the laws, though Campbell countered that he had merely extracted and codified them from Asimov's stories.
These nine stories, one of the most famous and influential science-fiction series, have been mostly ignored in the movie, beyond supplying Proyas with two characters (murdered scientist Lanning and robot psychologist Susan Calvin, played by Bridget Moynahan), some plot ideas (mostly from "Reason" and "Escape!") and, of course, Asimov's laws.
