I, Robot Themes

I, Robot is a classic science fiction book in the sense that it takes some technology that doesn't exist and asks, "what would life be like if we did have this?" The big technology in I, Robot is r...

If you expected a lot of mindless adventure in I, Robot, then you were probably surprised by how much these stories focus on morality and ethics and how few explosions there are. In I, Robot, one o...

In I, Robot, one of the most common responses to new technology is fear. Asimov doesn't spend a lot of time in these stories looking at people who are afraid of robots but don't understand them, li...

In I, Robot, people can be quite foolish about robots. First, they can be foolish and think that robots are a threat (which is foolish because robots are not a threat… right?); second, some human...

In I, Robot, there are several ways to communicate, but sometimes language leads to miscommunication. For instance, Robbie can't talk and has to communicate through body language (making a "C" in t...

Robots are constrained by the Three Laws: they don't have a lot of choice about what they can do. For instance, if a robot sees someone in danger, it has to act. In I, Robot, it may seem like Asimo...

"Friendship" is interesting in I, Robot because there are many close relationships in this book—but we're not sure that we'd want to call them friendships. For instance, Gloria calls Robbie a fri...

I, Robot is very interested in questions of superiority and domination—who has power, who should have power, and what people (or robots) do with that power. Robots certainly seem to have some pow...

There are a few different branches of science in this book—astronomy (Mercury, the Sun), physics, and chemistry (Runaround.168), but the most important science is the imaginary science of robopsy...

I, Robot is full of rules that may or may not help people to live full lives: there are the robots' Three Laws, there are the government's rules (including banning robots first and then joining int...