Little Lost Robot

Isaac Asimov was a very talented science fiction writer. His works allow us to step back and look at human beings from the perspective of other entities, primarily robots. For the foreseeable duration of this blog, I will be analyzing, connecting, and perhaps rambling about associations resulting from his short stories, chronicled in Robot Dreams. The first in this collection is Little Lost Robot. This story is about an industrial robot that gets told to “get lost.” Being a robot endowed with the three laws of robotics, he takes this command literally. He hides in a shipment of 62 identical robots. However, there is something special about this robot and the scientists need to find him before work can resume on the sensitive project.

The bulk of the story is various tests that the scientists put the robots through in order to determine which is the “little lost robot.” These tests are an assortment of things meant to force the robots to kill themselves to save a human, because the difference between the lost robot and the others was that he could allow harm to come to humans as result of inaction, the normal robots couldn’t. It is a very interesting story because it explores human robot interactions and it raises questions about what it means to be human. Does the fact that we’ve created a robot that can comprehend it’s existence mean that we can choose to destroy it? Do we have a right to rule these sentient beings with inbred laws? How can we rationalize this when they learn faster and more than us? What happens when they can do more than us? What if they decide they should no longer listen to their inferior creators? These are the questions raised by many of Asimov’s stories.