I, Robot

Why it's worth it

Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics turn up in real AI ethics discussions to this day, and this is where they come from. Nine linked stories about logical machines meeting illogical people, each a small puzzle about rules that don't cover every case.

Every story here is a specification bug. A robot follows its rules exactly and produces something nobody wanted — which is, almost word for word, the alignment problem Christian needs five hundred pages to lay out. Asimov got there decades earlier, twenty pages at a time, with a plot attached. Reading the two side by side is the fastest education in AI ethics you can give yourself.

The prose is bare and quick, and that's why it holds up. No lectures, no long setups. Susan Calvin, the robopsychologist who narrates much of it, is still one of fiction's sharpest characters for thinking about machine minds. Readers who come to the book from the film are usually startled by how little the two have in common.

From our review of 10 books for understanding ai, by David Sinclair, Managing Editor

What we like

• +Every story here is a specification bug
• +The prose is bare and quick, and that's why it holds up
• +It's also the smallest commitment on this list

What to know

• –The social attitudes have aged badly, particularly around women, and several readers say the puzzle format wears thin by the…
• –And it's fiction. It'll sharpen how you think about rules and unintended consequences, but it won't tell you a thing about how a…