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Book club
I, Robot
  1. Katharine Harding
  1. Department of Neurology, University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Katharine Harding, Institute for Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neurosciences, Cardiff University, University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff CF14 4XW, UK; katharineharding{at}doctors.org.uk

https://doi.org/10.1136/practneurol-2017-001710

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    Cardiff book club’s latest foray into classic science fiction was with I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov.1 Originally a set of short stories published in magazines in the 1940s, these were then combined into one book and connected by an interlinking story in which a writer interviews Dr Susan Calvin, a robopsychologist, about her career. It combines the futuristic nature of robotics with a definite feel of its time: everything is made of metal, humans are quite violent towards robots and having a woman scientist as the main character is mildly shocking.

    I, Robot famously includes the Three Laws of Robotics: ‘1 - A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm. 2- A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3 …

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    Footnotes

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

    • Correction notice This paper has been amended since it was published Online First. Owing to a scripting error, some of the publisher names in the references were replaced with 'BMJ Publishing Group'. This only affected the full text version, not the PDF. We have since corrected these errors and the correct publishers have been inserted into the references.

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