Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
The stories were not initially conceived as a set, but rather all feature his positronic robots -- indeed there are some inconsistencies among them, especially between the short stories and the novels. They all, however, share a theme of the interaction of humans, robots, and morality. Some of the short stories found in The Complete Robot and other anthologies are clearly not set in the same universe as most of them (the Foundation Universe), even though they feature positronic robots obeying the Three Laws. These stories are "Let's Get Together" and "Victory Unintentional".
Shortly before his death in 1992, Asimov approved an outline for three novels (Caliban, Inferno, Utopia) by Roger MacBride Allen, set between Robots and Empire and the Empire Series, telling the story of the terraforming of the Spacer world Inferno, and about the robot revolution started by creating a No Law Robot and then New Law Robots.
There is also another set of novels by various authors (Isaac Asimov's Robots series/Robot City series/Robots and Aliens series/Robots in Time series) loosely connected to the Robots Series, but they contain many inconsistencies with Asimov's books, and are not generally considered canon.
The first film version of Asimov's robot stories were five episodes of British television series Out of the Unknown, based on robot short stories and novels. They were: "The Caves of Steel" (1964), "Satisfaction Guaranteed" (1966), "The Prophet" (1967), based on short story "Reason", "Liar!" (1969), and "The Naked Sun" (1969).
In 1999, short story "The Bicentennial Man" was made into a movie starring Robin Williams.
In the late 1970s, Harlan Ellison produced a Screenplay based on Asimov's book I, Robot. The film was never made, but the script appeared in book form under the title I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay (1994).
A motion picture adaptation of I, Robot starring Will Smith was released in July 2004 by Twentieth Century Fox. See I, Robot (movie) for details.
The fictional characters Lieutenant commander Data, his eldest brother B-4, and his evil brother Lore from Star Trek: The Next Generation, are androids equipped with positronic brains, as an homage to Asimov's robots. Data follows a behavioral code much like the Three Laws of Robotics (one episode references them), and his kin do not. Other characters speak of Data's "ethical and moral subroutines", implying that they are not always paramount in his decision-making process, but instead are activated during times of unusual stress. This may explain why Data has avoided the problem of "mental freeze-out" which plagues Asimov's robots. Data has been shown placing the good of large groups over that of individuals, a version of the Zeroth Law.
Although these stories are well-known, it is hardly ever recognized that Asimov's robots are nothing at all like computers, as the main series of them predated any of the major computer projects. The main stumbling block is that writing a program that would be able to determine whether any of the three laws would be violated is far more difficult than writing one for machine vision, or speech recognition, or even comprehending the activities and motivations in the human world, which is only attempted by determining a vast list of rules to check. Also, the stories' robots never get programming viruses, or require updates. They may, however, have new features installed (like R. Giskard, as we are told in Robots and Empire). Most importantly, they only stop functioning due to a clash between the (hypothetical) subroutines which determine whether one of the laws has been violated, never a crash of a subroutine itself: they are never at a loss as to what is going on, only what to do about it.
Rather than precursors of robots that may be made as derivatives of computers, Asimov's robots are actually what in philosophy are called homunculi, thought experiments on what sort of being would result from considering a human being and removing one or more of these characteristics. The best example of this in recent philosophy is considering whether there could be a creature that speaks and acts like a human being but lacks self-consciousness, and what's more, considering how someone else would know from observation whether such a being lacks this capacity.
| Series: | Followed by: |
|---|---|
| Foundation Series | Empire Series |