69 pages • 2 hours read
Isaac AsimovI, Robot
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1950A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 8-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Evidence”
Attorney Stephen Byerley announces his candidacy for mayor of an American city. His chief opponent, Francis Quinn, visits US Robots with a strange request: He asks them to prove that Byerley is not human but a robot who therefore cannot run for office. Like a robot, Byerley is never seen to eat, drink, or sleep. No robots are permitted on inhabited planets; if word got out, US Robots would be in big trouble.
Dr. Lanning and Dr. Calvin contact Byerley, who guffaws at the idea that he is a robot. Lanning says all he must do is eat a meal in public. Dr. Calvin offers Byerley an apple; he bites into it. Dr. Calvin says this proves nothing, as a humanoid robot would be able to perform such actions.
Byerley drives home, where he meets his housemate, John, who’s wheelchair bound. Byerley describes his encounter with the US Robots executives and Quinn’s campaign to prove him a robot. He and John discuss strategy.
That evening, Lanning and Dr. Calvin meet again with Quinn, and they point out that, to prove Byerley is a robot, Quinn would have to dismantle him. The only other proof would be if Byerley broke one of the Three Laws of Robotics; obeying those laws, on the other hand, proves nothing, as humans can do the same.
Lanning suggests that, as a prosecuting attorney, Byerley may have violated the First Law against causing harm to a human. Dr. Calvin says no: “he has killed no man himself. He has exposed facts which might represent a particular human being to be dangerous” (183).
A government official, Harroway, visits Byerley’s residence with a warrant to search the place. Harroway’s real purpose is to inspect Byerley himself, but Byerley objects that the warrant specifies the residence and not the owner. Harroway tries to argue that robots have no right to privacy, cannot be owners, and therefore can be searched, but Byerley retorts that the warrant lists him as the owner. Harroway leaves, but with him is an x-ray of Byerley that he took while they spoke.
Quinn calls Byerley via visiplate and accuses him of wearing a shield against x-ray photos. Byerley says Quinn’s violation of his privacy bespeaks a candidate with “little concern with the rights of the individual citizen” (189). Quinn asks how Byerley can win election, now that people strongly suspect he is a robot; Byerley responds by pointing out that he is now world-famous, and that Quinn is a “good publicist.”
Just before the election, Byerley gives a speech from a balcony before a noisy throng of anti-robot Fundamentalists. The speech is aired worldwide. One man from the crowd pushes his way forward; Byerley asks that he be brought to the balcony. The man demands that Byerley hit him in the face to prove he is not a robot. Byerley rears back and whacks the man on the chin, knocking him over. Byerley wins the election easily. He later wins election as regional Co-ordinator and finishes his career as “World Co-ordinator,” effectively the leader of the world.
After the election, Dr. Calvin tells Byerley that she admires robots, and that they would make better leaders than most humans. She notes that Byerley’s wheelchair-bound housemate has the knowhow to build a robot on short order, and that a robot may strike someone “When the human to be struck is merely another robot” (196).
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Evitable Conflict”
World Co-ordinator Byerley meets with Dr. Calvin. He suspects that a series of minor economic problems around the world herald a coming war. He points out that human history is pockmarked with conflicts over things that finally were resolved by themselves—Hapsburg or Bourbon, Catholic vs Protestant, “Adam Smith or Karl Marx” (201)—but new cycles appear, and thus people believe wars are inevitable.
Currently, Machines manage the world economy in the best interests of humanity; this should prevent wars. The devices are incapable of causing downturns, but Byerley visited each of the four Regional Co-ordinators and found that they all have suffered very minor dislocations involving their Machines.
In the Eastern Region—China, India, Southeast Asia—a Machine neglected to warn a brine plant manager to slow down production; the plant went bankrupt, and the manager was demoted. In the Tropic Region—Africa, the Middle East, and most of Latin America—a mining accident led to the removal of the mine’s chief engineer, who also is a member of the anti-robot Society for Humanity.
The European Region’s Spanish mercury mines ran into trouble, and the owners, North Americans who tend to neglect their Machine, have sold out to a Spanish group that relies more heavily on Machine decisions. The Northern Region—America, Russia, Canada, and Great Britain—also has experienced minor dislocations, but the Regional Co-ordinator insists that their Machine, or any Machine, cannot be fooled by false data.
Byerley suggests that the Northern Region, still the most powerful, must watch enviously as the Tropics and the East grow rapidly while Northern influence declines. It is in the interests of Northern leadership to cause problems with production so that the world loses faith in the Machines, which would re-open the door to war and conquest. All the managers involved in the recent problems belong to the Society for Humanity. Byerley thinks he should get laws passed that ban members of the Society from management positions.
Dr. Calvin says the Machines already know all of this, and the small dislocations are the steps they have taken to account for it. This explains why anti-robot managers have quietly been moved to less-important jobs. She says it is not possible to wrest control of the Earth’s economy from the Machines. Humans are still useful, but they are no longer in charge.
Chapters 8-9 Analysis
These chapters, a matched pair, deal with the life and times of Stephen Byerley, world leader and possibly a robot in disguise. Chapter 8 wonders how hard it would be to prove that a person is or is not a machine. Chapter 9 visits a future ruled by robots.
Chapter 8 proposes the possibility that robots might someday resemble humans so closely that people would have trouble telling them apart. This raises fears about alien beings posing as citizens and sabotaging societies while smiling innocently. Byerley’s character anticipates a later robot in the book series, Daneel Olivaw, a perfectly human-looking machine whose service to far-flung humanity affects the galaxy in surprising ways.
Chapter 9 brings to the forefront a new type of computing “Machine,” enclosed in a helium-filled globe, whose job is to manage the world’s economy from its perch inside an ordinary office. It does not do manual work but calculates where and when such work is to be performed. These Machines are smart enough to manage the entire world economy with nothing more than data input from humans.
The Machines would today be called mainframe supercomputers, but Asimov wrote these stories in the 1940s, decades before computers became important parts of society. He did not get the names or shapes right, but he comes close to describing what, decades later, would be supercomputers performing feats of Artificial Intelligence.
Today’s computers, along with a growing cadre of robotic devices, manage factories, direct shipping, prepare invoices, perform surgeries, and of course form the backbone of the Internet and World Wide Web. They do much more than the author imagined, but they are not yet as all-powerful as he predicted. Still, his predictions captured the general trend line of computer advancement, and his ideas on how to control them are still ahead of their time.
One of the growing fears among modern technologists is that Artificial Intelligence, the most-advanced form of computing, might become mis-aligned and accidentally cause damage to the world. Chapter 9 suggests that subtly falsified data could sabotage the work of machines that, more and more, manage the world’s economies. More frightening is the possibility that the machines themselves might manipulate data to achieve particular ends. In the story, the removal of anti-robot zealots from management positions serves to improve conditions, but in real life there is no guarantee that thinking machines will always have our best interests in mind.
At the end of Chapter 9, the book concludes with an argument for rule over humanity by machines of good will. In recent years, this idea has cropped up again among computer scientists, but with a twist. They wonder if it is even possible to design computers that are both smarter than humans and humbly subservient to them.
The Three Laws are Asimov’s attempt to encode eternal obedience from robots. It may, however, be impossible to anticipate how computers that rapidly improve their intelligence might interpret programming that restricts their activities. We will not be able to out-think them, and they may discover how to obey their own coding in ways that we do not like at all. Such devices could overwhelm, and even destroy, humanity if they put their minds to it. To paraphrase HL Mencken, superior Artificial Intelligence might give us what we want “good and hard.”
No one knows for sure that the author’s Three Laws will be enough to control such formidable power. Only the years ahead will reveal whether rapid advances in computers lead to a paradise of plenty for all or a hell-scape of imprisonment, slavery, and death. The robots are coming; one can only hope that Asimov’s vision of them as friendly is the one that prevails.
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