Alex Proyas never got a high school diploma - a fact he blames on Isaac Asimov. It was Asimov’s short story "Nightfall" that derailed Proyas’ academic career. "It’s a wonderful vision of how the world can suddenly descend into anarchy," says Proyas, 41, describing the chaos that ensues in "Nightfall" when all six of a planet’s suns set for the first time in 2,049 years. "I tried to convince my English teachers to assign us some science fiction, but they wouldn’t. It opened a rift between my creative desires and what the system wanted me to explore." So Proyas quit school and took his education upon himself, reading the works of Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip K. Dick.
It makes sense then that Proyas’ career as a film director has been defined by fantasy. His 1994 movie The Crow, based on the James O’Barr comic book, immediately gained cult status after Brandon Lee (the only son of kung fu master Bruce Lee) was killed in a freakish accident on set. In 1998, he directed Dark City, a visually rich and haunting movie about the surreal wanderings of an amnesiac accused of murder. "I like movies made for adolescent grown-ups," says Proyas. "A few decades ago, it was still true that the golden age of science fiction readers was 12, but in my lifetime, it’s become a mainstream genre."
This July, Proyas turns again to his favored genre with I, Robot, an adaptation of Asimov’s nine-story collection of the same name. "This is the definitive movie about robots," says Proyas. "It’s the most faithful cinematic reworking of Asimov’s stories to date, true to the spirit and ideas, yet reenvisioned." The film takes place in Chicago in the year 2035, just as the NS-5 automated domestic assistant comes to market. The all-purpose personal robot is expected to have such wide appeal that it will shift the ratio of humans to bots from about 15 to 1 to 5 to 1. But the release is tarnished when an NS-5 named Sonny is accused of murder. Detective Del Spooner, played by Will Smith, is assigned to track down the killer. As with all of Asimov’s stories, the movie revolves around his Three Laws of Robotics, a set of rules governing android behavior. The central mystery: How could a robot programmed not to harm a human actually commit murder?
Isaac Asimov wrote some 500 novels and short stories in his lifetime, and more than a thousand nonfiction essays. He was a gentleman. A scientist. A mensch. He graciously received the fans that flocked to him at conventions, giving each a moment of his time. He penned dozens of stories devoted to androids with positronic brains, a term he invented to suggest an intelligent being, and coined the neologism robotics in the process. He lent his name to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (now published as Asimov’s) and answered correspondence in the magazine’s letters column from its founding in 1977 until his death 15 years later. The magazine has won more Hugos, science fiction’s greatest honor, than any other publication in the history of the genre. Asimov’s is the first place that many writers (myself included) ever approached with a story idea.
Born in a Russian shtetl, Asimov immigrated to the US when he was 3. As a teen, he became a voracious reader and joined the legion of first-generation science fiction fans. Asimov sent his first robot story, "Robbie," to Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1939. It was a simple tale about a wistful robot that functioned as a little girl’s nursemaid. Editors at Astounding rejected it, but Fred Pohl at Super Science Stories published it in the September 1940 issue under the title "Strange Playfellow." "The story was derived from the experience of being in America from 1930 to 1940," explains John Clute, coeditor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, "when technology and science were used to make culture and the family actually work." Consider how WPA spending on government engineering projects helped inspire a nation reeling from the Depression. Americans wanted to hear from men of vision who had ideas for improving the republic. The newsstands swelled with pulp magazines.
"The Astounding stable of writers at the time really believed that reasoned argument would win the world," says Clute. "They liked uncomplicated rules for understanding and improving society." It was an approach that blended fact and fiction, and represented their agendas thinly disguised as stories.
While many writers of the day trafficked in alien encounters and space travel, Asimov preferred robots. (Perhaps he shunned space because of his acrophobia - he avoided air travel whenever possible his whole life.) But Asimov rejected the traditional plot: Man creates humanlike robot, robot runs amok, robot kills man. He viewed it as reactionary, antiscience propaganda - like Judaism’s golem and Frankenstein’s monster. So he set out to reform the robot’s bad rap, by making machines an example of how the world could be bettered through the mastery of technology. It embodied his hope for a rational, humanist way of being - the best and the worst of what it means to be a hairless ape. The robot was artificial intelligence in a man’s shape, a foil for asking what it means to be human and what rules should govern us. With optimistic flourish, he believed robots could serve as an example of man’s potential.
Asimov’s editor at Astounding (now published under the anachronistic name Analog) was John Campbell. He bought the bulk of Asimov’s early stories, and the two collaborated for 29 years. Campbell was legendary for his hands-on editorial style. He would sit down for hours with writers, batting ideas back and forth and shaping them to suit his vision. (He never published an alien conflict tale where the aliens won, for example.) It was during one such meeting in 1940 that Campbell helped codify the now-famous Three Laws of Robotics.
[ 1 ] A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
[ 2 ] A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders conflict with the First Law.
[ 3 ] A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The laws were more than a bicycle’s chain guard. Asimov considered them an algorithm for right robot living and applied them to each of his stories. He even proposed a parallel Three Laws of Humanics for people to follow to make for a happy and good life.
Asimov’s thinking robots crept their way into many of his colleagues’ stories of the ’40s and ’50s and into the imagination of scientists. "Coming back to Asimov’s work years later, specifically to I, Robot, the extraordinary thing is how prophetic it was," says Proyas. "Real scientists and engineers take the laws seriously and conjecture about what they mean to robots in reality."
But for all of Asimov’s ability to entertain us with his ideas, there’s still no sign 65 years after his first robot story was penned of the artificial intelligence he envisioned. There’s Asimo, Honda’s million-dollar humaniform bot, which can move only when a real person is driving it, and Roomba, the autonomous robo-vacuum from iRobot whose movements resemble those of insects. Unlike rocketry - a real engineering discipline inspired by science fiction - intelligent robots (and virtual reality for that matter, which 20 years after cyberpunk is pretty much dead in the water) serve best as metaphors for the zeitgeist of their eras.
And as vividly as Asimov imagined a future propelled by robots, he conspicuously ignored technologies that have truly transformed our world, namely the computer and the computer network. When they do make appearances in his fiction, they’re cursory: Computers are remote controls for robots over unreliable networks; invariably they lead to disaster. Hackers don’t figure in, either. Rather than the eclectic, self-taught, transgressive cyberpunk antihero, Asimov favored protagonists in white lab coats that do Jerry Lewis spit-takes in the presence of a girl. (And the girls don’t fare much better. Susan Calvin, the recurring mother of robopsychology in Asimov stories, is a desexualized dried-up matron of great sternness - a far cry from William Gibson’s Molly Mirrorshades.) Moreover, while the laws are compelling, they’re the kind of moral code that can be summed up in a book the size and complexity of Who Moved My Cheese? In the real world, the simplicity of the laws just doesn’t fly. Take the question of harm that appears in the first law. Harm is not a binary proposition, as anyone who’s ever been told to spare the rod and spoil the child knows.
Yet Asimov’s reductionist approach to human interaction may be his most lasting influence. His thinking is alive and well and likely filling your inbox at this moment with come-ons asking you to identify your friends and rate their "sexiness" on a scale of one to three. Today’s social networking services like Friendster and Orkut collapse the subtle continuum of friendship and trust into a blunt equation that says, "So-and-so is indeed my friend," and "I trust so-and-so to see all my other ’friends.’" These systems demand that users configure their relationships in a way that’s easily modeled in software. It reflects a mechanistic view of human interaction: "If Ann likes Bob and Bob hates Cindy, then Ann hates Cindy." The idea that we can take our social interactions and code them with an Asimovian algorithm ("allow no harm, obey all orders, protect yourself") is at odds with the messy, unpredictable world. The Internet succeeds because it is nondeterministic and unpredictable: The Net’s underlying TCP/IP protocol makes no quality of service guarantees and promises nothing about the route a message will take or whether it will arrive.
This need for people to behave in a predictable, rational, measurable way recalls Mr. Spock’s autistic inability to understand human emotion without counting dimples to discern happiness or frown lines to identify sorrow. It’s likewise reminiscent of scientology, which uses quantitative charts of personality traits, such as "lack of accord" and "certainty," to help people become 100 percent happy, composed, and so on.
Asimov tacitly acknowledged that his algorithmic approach to the world is problematic. It’s why so many of his stories hinge on what happens when a robot confronts a situational paradox - say, the need to lie to its masters to keep them from experiencing the "harm" of unhappiness. Nevertheless, throughout the robot stories, there is a yearning for people to be better behaved and to steer clear of their superstitious dread of machines gone amok, something Asimov and his characters are forever calling "the Frankenstein complex."
In 1992, at age 72, Asimov died of complications from AIDS contracted through tainted blood following heart surgery. In his later years, he had become an enthusiastic computer supporter, even acting as the pitchman for RadioShack’s TRS-80 PC. Right up to the end, he wrote about his robots as though they were right around the corner.
Asimov’s stories aren’t brilliant fiction; he was no prose stylist and his characters, especially women, are wooden and one-dimensional. His work is a kind of proto-fiction, stuff caught in the Burgess Shale of the genre, from a time before the field shed its gills and developed lungs, feet, and believable characters. What makes Asimov’s robots stand out, even today, is the resiliency of his imagination. Despite the complete failure of anything like a thinking robot to appear on the scene, the vision endures. Many people still believe that someday soon we’ll have thinking robots living among us.
Admit it: Half of Hollywood’s "classic" droids belong on the scrap heap. (Hello, C-3PO!) Here are the big-screen robots that really get our gears going. - Michelle Devereaux
Best Male Pleasure Bot
Gigolo Joe (A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, 2001)
Never mind the waxy skin. If you’re going to be serviced by an inorganic being, it should look like Jude Law. This soft-shoe dancing love mecha is programmed to woo women: He emits romantic Jazz Age standards with a flick of his head, and he can change his hair color and alter his voice to suit his clients. Once you go bot, you never go back.
Best Female Pleasure Bot
Ruby (Teknolust, 2002)
This half-human, half-computer fembot needs male chromosomes to live, so she’s always on the hunt for donors. Using downloaded dialog from old movies as pickup lines, Ruby seduces men and unknowingly spreads a debilitating computer virus in the process. Fortunately, it’s nothing that a quick hard drive scan won’t fix. Cybersex has never seemed so literal.
Best Pistol-Packing Bot
The Gunslinger (Westworld, 1973)
Equipped with ultrasonic hearing and infrared vision (Hollywood’s first CG effect), this hair-trigger robot (Yul Brynner) plays black hat in the titular theme park of the future. That is, until he goes haywire and attacks the customers for real. What’s freakier, being relentlessly hunted by the current governor of California or the king of Siam?
Best Hardworking Bot
Huey and Dewey (Silent Running, 1972)
Whether performing surgery on astronaut Freeman Lowell or playing five-card stud, these reprogrammed droids (originally intended to maintain the space station) have an unparalleled work ethic. Plus, unlike the sci-fi genre’s many machines bent on human domination, these bots couldn’t be cuddlier. R2-D2 is the son they never had.
Best Bait-and-Switch Bot
Screamers (Screamers, 1995)
Developed as weapons of war, these self-replicating killers prey on anything with a pulse, ripping through flesh and bone like soft, ripe cheese. Evolved from simple battle-bots, they now take the form of children and wounded soldiers (who actually bleed). There’s only one way to tell friend from foe: a signature, high-pitched shriek. Of course, once you hear it, you’re pretty much dead.
Best Doppelgénger Bot
False Maria (Metropolis, 1927)
After Rotwang the mad scientist pumps this high-class humanoid full of electrical current, it becomes the sexy evil twin of the virginal leader of the Resistance. When False Maria isn’t inciting violent proletariat uprisings, she moonlights as a raccoon-eyed exotic dancer. Call her the original femme métal.
Best Surveillance Bot
Spyders (Minority Report, 2002)
OK, they have three legs, not eight, but when it comes to sheer creepiness, these crawlers have real arachnids beat. Dispatched by the Precrime police unit, the spyders invade the homes of unsuspecting citizens, detect their slightest motion, and scan their eyeballs to determine their identities. Anyone who doesn’t comply is shocked into submission.
Best Torture Bot
IT-O (Star Wars, 1977)
This small hoverbot looks benign. That is, until the power shears come out. With razor-sharp pincers, acid jets, and a hypodermic needle full of the latest hallucinogenic drugs, the IT-O helps the Empire extract the information necessary to do its dirty deeds. The ultimate insult to the Rebel Alliance? The upper half of its body is an R2 unit’s head, just repainted.
Contributing writer Cory Doctorow (doctorow@craphound.com) wrote about case mods in Wired 11.10. 
credit Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox
I, Robot: 2035és killer app, the NS-5 automated domestic assistant
credit Getty
I, immigrant: Asimov returns to Ellis Island, 59 years after his arrival from a village in Russia.
credit Photo by Joe Pugliese
éI like movies made for adolescent grown-ups,é says director Alex Proyas (Dark City, The Crow).
credit Photo from MPTV
Gigolo Joe (A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, 2001)
credit Photo courtesy of L. Hershman/Teknolust LLC
Ruby (Teknolust, 2002)
credit Photo from Everett Collection
The Gunslinger (Westworld, 1973)
credit Photo from Everett Collection
Huey and Dewey (Silent Running, 1972)
credit Photo from Everett Collection
Screamers (Screamers, 1995)
credit Photo from MPTV
False Maria (Metropolis, 1927)
credit Photo courtesy of 20th Century Fox
Spyders (Minority Report, 2002)
credit Photo courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM.
IT-O (Star Wars, 1977)
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