Truemors
is reporting from
Member
NP Rank:
NP Rank:
Remember Dr. Susan Calvin and "Liar"
Share:
by biverson | January 20, 2008 at 11:23 am
829 views | 12 Recommendations | 2 comments
From SF Reviews, I pulled this summary of Asimov's best story IMHO, "Liar," where ..."Other strange crises emerge: in "Liar!",
Susan Calvin encounters a robot that by some fluke is able to read minds.
Unfortunately, in its interpretation of the don't-harm-humans law, it
proceeds to feed people any line of bullshit they want to hear (regarding
their careers, love lives, etc.), on the basis that the truth would hurt
too much." That was a story out of "I, Robot" that stuck in my mind, so I couldn't believe this item I got via slashdot from Gizmodo:
Three colonies of bots in the 50th generation learned to signal to other robots in the group when then found food or poison. But the fourth colony included lying cheats that signaled food when they found poison and then calmly rolled over to the real food while other robots went to their battery-death. Eerily wicked, to say the least. Saving the robots' honor, luckily, there were also a few "hero robots" that signalled danger and then rolled to their death to save the others.
What is NowPublic?
NowPublic lets people work together to cover news events around the world.
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (2)
at 11:52 on January 20th, 2008
crazy...
at 12:42 on January 20th, 2008
The story doesn't say whether or not the herobots engaged in herobotics because of the dastardly deeds of the liarbots, or just on general robo-principle.