I, Robot - Chapter 4: Catch That Rabbit!

October 6th 2009

Chapter 4 again follows Mike Donovan and Greg Powell. It’s 6 months later, and they are on an asteroid station, overlooking robot model DV-5, nick named “Dave” and his DV mining team. While watching the robots in their one-week overview to make sure everything is okay, well, things turn out to be not okay. Dave is sending out strange commands to his robot team. Greg and Mike have seen the robots doing marches up and down the mining perimeters. However once Mike and Greg come in contact with them, they immediately go back to work, and when questioned have no memory of the, malfunctions, so to speak at all.

Again, Isaac Asimov shows a very creative but realistic idea of how the future should play out. Asteroid mining in Isaac’s future plays a big role in economy, and if our world some time in the future could extend to something like this, we would probably be a lot more stable and sophisticated.

Dave commands six robots around the asteroid, often referred to by Mike and Greg as Dave’s fingers. In the end, 6 robots turned out to be one too many, as Dave couldn’t handle operating 6 different radio frequencies at once. His level of robotics just wasn’t capable of it.
All of these stories in space kind of have me wondering what life on earth is like in Isaac’s 2015. It appears we really haven’t progressed to this future that the author portrayed, or at least robot and space travel wise. I, Robot was written in the 1960s and back then, some people thought that robots and flying cars were to be introduced as early as the 80s, so it is easy to understand why Isaac chose to vision this kind of future.