Robots turn on humans in the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Credit: © Twentieth Century Fox

Isaac Asimov called the movie version of his book I, Robot "the first really adult, complex, worthwhile science fiction movie ever made". Sadly, he wasn't talking about the movie that has just been released in the United States by Twentieth Century Fox, starring Will Smith, but about the screenplay that Asimov developed himself in collaboration with science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison, completed in 1978. That earlier version has been called the greatest sci-fi movie never made.

Ellison, one of the most celebrated sci-fi authors of his day, was commissioned to turn Asimov's vision of the future of robotics into a movie only after other writers and directors had for years struggled and failed to transfer the book to celluloid. Part of the problem was that I, Robot (first published in 1950) is not a novel but a collection of short stories, each of them examining complications in the interaction between humans and (humanoid) robots. Certain characters and themes recurred in these tales, but there was no master narrative. They were instead a series of meditations on the philosophical and social conundrums posed by Asimov's most celebrated invention: the Three Laws of Robotics.

Asimov was smart to limit the laws to three, thereby alluding to the profundity of those famous legal trios of physical science, Newton's laws of motion and the laws of thermodynamics. They are quoted right at the beginning of the new movie:

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 would 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

Really useful robots will not look humanoid; quite possibly they will be protean things, reconfiguring themselves to the task at hand

Asimov's stories have become such an established part of robot folklore that his three laws have shaped some of the fundamental thinking in the development of real-life robotic engineering and artificial intelligence. In the movie, however, much of the action is motivated by robots that have in some way (don't ask too closely) been programmed to evade these laws, under which circumstances their chests conveniently start glowing red.

The ensuing near-catastrophe is ultimately impelled by the master-computer at the US Robotics company, called Viki, which decides that humans will have to be enslaved by robots for their own good, to prevent them continuing to kill and wage war on each other. This is ironic, because Asimov was more concerned that his 'three-law' robots would fail to take account of the interests of humanity as a whole. The First Law would force them to save a single human even at the cost of endangering the rest of humanity. As a result, Asimov proposed in 1985 to add a further, 'Zeroth' Law to his rules:

0. A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

Arguably, it is only through the implementation of such a law that the movie's premise would become feasible.

Thus, Asimov's aim with his robot stories (there were more in his later book, The Rest of the Robots) was to explore the consequences, and in particular the loopholes, of the logical scheme that he had established. Roger Clarke, an information-technology consultant in Australia, has argued that these stories act collectively to demolish the initial contention: they demonstrate, Clarke says, that "it is not possible to reliably constrain the behaviour of robots by devising a set of rules." Both the logical and the semantic ambiguities of the laws leave too much scope for interpretation. The movie, in contrast, doesn't much care how its robots are compelled to run amok, so long as the results are noisy and pyrotechnic.

Is this how real-life robots will look in the future? Credit: © Twentieth Century Fox

But perhaps one of the most telling aspects of the movie is the construction of the robots themselves. This is supposed to be the year 2035, yet except for faces made of soft plastic, which are capable of subtle human-like expressions (albeit with the gears and levers faintly visible beneath), these creatures are straight out of the era of Asimov's original book: utterly humanoid, with metal shafts and cables in place of muscles. They are streamlined versions of Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), or like Star Wars' C-3PO on speed. It is abundantly clear that really useful robots will not look this way; quite possibly they will be protean things, reconfiguring themselves to the task at hand.

My robots were machines designed by engineers, not pseudo-men created by blasphemers Isaac Asimov

And there's the giveaway. I, Robot is not in the end a movie about robotics (forget the token stuff about robots evolving feelings, which was handled far better in Blade Runner, a movie to which I, Robot is deeply indebted). Instead it is the old promethean legend once again - the story of the Golem of Prague, of Viktor Frankenstein, of the man who makes a monster he cannot control. It was in just such a tale, written by the Czech playwright Karel Çapek in 1918, that the word 'robot' first appeared, derived from the Czech robota, meaning 'forced labour'. In Çapek's story, a race of beings created as slaves by a scientist called Rossum (from the Czech rozum, reason) rebels and wipes out humanity.

It was precisely such a clichéd view of the robot that Asimov sought to displace. "Under the influence of the well-known deeds and ultimate fate of Frankenstein and Rossum", he said, "there seemed only one change to be rung on this plot - robots were created and destroyed by their creator. I quickly grew tired of this dull hundred-times-told tale. I began in 1940 to write robot stories of my own - but robot stories of a new variety." Evidently it is not so easy to dislodge a myth.