69 pages • 2 hours read
Isaac AsimovI, Robot
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1950A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Liar!”
The first 33 RB robots were built without problems, but the 34th can read minds. He starts chatting with one of the US Robot executives by discussing, not anything the man says, but what he is thinking. It is an amazing development; the company’s top brass decides to find out why.
While the other managers review the complex procedures for building positronic brains, in search of anything that might have triggered the new ability, Dr. Calvin interviews RB-34—“Herbie”—and tries to learn how he reads minds and whether it alters his behaviors.
She starts by bringing Herbie several large books that he requested on hyperatomic motors. The robot finishes them within half an hour, then pronounces them “all so incredibly simple, that it’s scarcely worth bothering about” (95). He does enjoy fiction, however, with its exploration of human feelings and desires. It helps him understand the incredible complexity of the human minds that he listens in on.
Dr. Calvin realizes that Herbie already knows she believes she is unattractive and has no hope of catching the eye of factory line technologist Milton Ashe. Herbie offers to help her: He says there are other attractive qualities besides looks. Dr. Calvin cannot believe a robot will be much help to a psychologist, but Herbie surprises her by announcing that Ashe loves her and is quite drawn to her intellect.
Staff mathematician Peter Bogert, on advice from Ashe, talks to Herbie about his theory on the cause of the mind-reading. Herbie finds no errors in Bogert’s calculations. Bogert then asks if the aging Dr. Lanning, plant director, is thinking of resigning. Herbie says the doctor already has given notice: He will quit as soon as the Herbie mystery is resolved, and he has chosen Bogert to replace him. Bogert is very pleased.
Dr. Lanning visits Bogert and says he has had Herbie work on the equations relating to his own brain, and the robot turns out to be a math genius: “he can do tricks you never heard of” (102). Bogert, offended, argues this cannot be possible. He says he knows Lanning has resigned and left him as the new chief, and that he is now in charge. Lanning says no such thing has happened, and he orders Bogert suspended. They are at an impasse and decide to see Herbie.
Ashe, during a meeting with Dr. Calvin, announces that he is getting married. Shocked, Dr. Calvin goes to see Herbie, who tells her she is dreaming and will wake shortly, and all will be well with Ashe. She realizes she is awake and that Herbie has lied to her. Herbie says, “I had to!” (106)
Just then, Lanning and Bogert arrive, and Lanning demands of Herbie what he told Bogert about a resignation. The robot cannot answer. Dr. Calvin bursts out laughing: Herbie, obeying the First Law about causing no harm, has told each of them what they wanted to hear because the truth would have hurt them. Lanning realizes that Herbie knows the solution to the problem of his own manufacture but cannot reveal it because it will hurt Lanning to know his own solution is wrong and that a machine is smarter than he is.
Dr. Calvin reminds Herbie of his dilemma, over and over: “You must tell them, but if you do, you hurt, so you mustn’t; but if you don’t, you hurt, so you must; but—” (110). Herbie cannot handle the mental load of this torment, and he collapses into a useless heap of metal. Lanning sighs; he and Bogert depart. Dr. Calvin, grim and angry, leans over the robot’s body and shouts, “Liar!”
Chapter 6 Summary: “Little Lost Robot”
Dr. Calvin’s interviewer asks about the history of the hyperatomic motor and interstellar travel. She says her connection to that project begins in 2029, when she and Bogert travel by spaceship to an asteroid group where research on hyperatomics is under way. It is Dr. Calvin’s first space voyage, and she does not like it.
They are sent to investigate a lost robot. The robot entered a cargo ship and joined 62 other robots being sent from Earth to various outposts. They are all identical, and General Kallner’s research group cannot figure out which robot is the missing one.
Researchers sometimes work for short periods under intense gamma radiation; they are safe, but their robots, built to protect them, invariably pull them from the dangerous situation before they can complete their work. The robots are ordered to stand down, but obeying orders is the Second Law, they are subservient to the First Law about protecting humans.
A top-secret project constructs several robots, the NS-2 series, or Nestors, whose First Law programming is modified so that they may permit a human to suffer harm. Deliberately, they are not marked in any special way, nor are subordinate researchers informed, lest word get out and the anti-robot Fundamentalists go on the warpath.
The missing robot has been at the asteroid only for a short while, and it does not yet show signs of wear. All 63 robots aboard the cargo ship claim they’ve not been on the asteroid; thus, one is lying.
Dr. Calvin is incensed that she was never told about the super-secret NS-2 project. Bogert assures her that the government was going to get its way, even if she balked.
General Kallner, Dr. Calvin, and Bogert interview scientist Gerald Black, the last researcher who saw the missing Nestor. He admits the robots, though necessary, can be frustrating. The Nestor in question bothered him with a request for a redo of an old test, and Black, already under stress from other problems, told the robot, “Go lose yourself” (122). Under further questioning, he also admits to uttering a string of profanities at the robot.
Dr. Calvin interviews all 63 robots onboard the cargo vessel but can’t detect any difference in their responses. She and Bogert analyze a recording of the interviews and can find no aberrations. Because one of the robots is lying, the risk of it escaping is too great; all 63 costly robots might have to be destroyed.
They run a field test on all the robots. A man is seated, a weight is dropped at his head, a beam diverts the weight, and the man remains safe. The robots are restrained during the test, but all instinctively move forward to protect the man. Once again, the missing robot hides itself by imitating the other robots’ instinctive move.
The investigators vary the test by adding a lethal risk to the robots themselves if they intervene to save the seated person. All the robots except one will jump forward anyway, since the First Law that forces them to protect humans supersedes the Third Law that forces them to protect themselves. Strangely, though, when the test begins, none of the robots try to help the seated man. During interviews, Dr. Calvin learns that the robots all realized that the man would die before they could save him, and that their own destruction would waste a resource that might later be able to save someone else. She asks each if this was their own idea, and every robot replies that one of them, they are not sure which, suggested it as the logical response to the tests.
They try one last test. This time, they tell the robots that gamma radiation will kill them if they try to save the person in the chair. All robots are isolated so they cannot talk to each other. Only one of them, the escaped robot, understands that the radiation is not gamma but harmless infrared. Dr. Calvin sits in the chair. The weight falls, and only one robot moves. Dr. Calvin commands that this robot step forward. The robot does so but says he must not be found, and he grabs Dr. Calvin to kill her. Black irradiates the Nestor with intense gamma rays that destroy his positronic brain and kill him.
The robot, says Dr. Calvin, developed a superiority complex about his kind, and he assumed the other robots would know about the infrared radiation, whereas only his training at the asteroid station gave him that knowledge. In short, “His very superiority caught him” (143).
Chapter 7 Summary: “Escape!”
Consolidated contacts US Robots, its main competitor in the quest to invent interstellar drives and offers to give them a profit share on any device they invent if they can just use US Robots’s central calculating machine. Scuttlebutt has it that Consolidated’s own big mechanical brain broke down while trying to work the calculations for a space drive.
The brain, effectively a robot under the authority of the Three Laws, may have come upon a solution that involves harming humans, and its need to comply with the command for a solution conflicted with its need to protect people from injury, so it froze up. Now Consolidated is six years behind schedule, and it is hoping to trick US Robot’s main computer into breaking down, too.
At a US Robots executive meeting, Dr. Calvin explains that the company’s central brain differs from Consolidated’s in that it has circuits that give it a childlike personality that does not take problems as seriously as other robots. It will intake all the information and will simply halt computations when it encounters the offending data. Dr. Bogert can then figure out why that data causes the conflict. They will return a no-solution answer to Consolidated, get paid for that result, and then work to solve the dilemma and invent the hyper-drive.
US Robots agrees to the task. Bogert and Dr. Lanning feed thousands of pages of data to the Brain. After several hours, the Brain says it has a solution and can build a hyperspace ship in two months. Stunned, the scientists wonder how the dilemma section slipped past the Brain. They decide to let it build the ship.
Powell and Donovan arrive to manage the robots that do the construction. When the work is finished, the two men get permission to inspect the ship. Its metallic interior gleams: in the cockpit, beneath a viewport in front of two form-fitting chairs, is a dial that measures parsecs from zero to one million. There are no other controls and no engines. The two men try to leave, but the exit passage is locked. They return to the cockpit and see, beyond the viewport, a sky full of stars.
The Brain tells a worried Dr. Calvin that the two men are traveling in the spaceship; they are fine and have enough food. She can radio them. Onboard, Powell and Donovan are arguing over whether the corporation tricked them into being test subjects when a voice calls their names and asks them to report in. They shout back, but the voice keeps repeating its call. The men explore the ship and find that, here and there, the walls suddenly pull back to reveal a food closet or a restroom.
Bogert believes the original problem—the one that broke Consolidated’s Super Brain—is that no one can survive inside the space warp that transports a hyperspace ship. Onboard, Powell and Donovan feel a vibration, and then Powell suffers a sudden burst of pain and blacks out. He feels like a thin strand of consciousness in an infinite emptiness; then he hears voices and finds himself standing in line to enter Hell.
Powell wakes up; so does Donovan, who reports hearing a sermon on the tortures of Hell. They look through the port and see the blue-white light of a sun not their own. The gauge reads 300,000 parsecs, somewhere beyond the galaxy. They are the first humans to travel this far. They reason that the ship will return them to Earth, which means they will have to “die” all over again.
The ship does return; the men are ok, but they need a shower. Dr. Calvin explains that she told the Brain not to worry too much about any hyperspace concept that would lead to a person’s death; this gave it the leeway to continue the calculations and discover that all matter in the warp field disappears and then reappears at the other end. Thus, people die and then come back, and no real harm befalls them.
To protect himself from the uncertainties of this process, the Brain develops a sense of humor and commits practical jokes: The food is all beans and milk; the radio is one-way only; the death experiences are tampered with so that darkly funny things happen within the passengers’ minds.
Powell suggests that, since Consolidated sent US Robots the hyper-space problem with ill intent, US Robots should fulfill the contract by sending Consolidated the completed ship but allow the Brain to add a few more practical jokes. Lanning and Bogert heartily agree.
Chapters 5-7 Analysis
In Chapters 5 through 7, Dr. Calvin takes charge and solves each mystery involving robot misbehavior. She figures out why the mind-reading robot must tell lies, why the morally untethered robot tries to escape, and how US Robot’s mechanical brain manages to invent a hyper-space drive even though it kills its passengers.
Herbie the mind-reading robot suffers torment from having to solve an impossible dilemma. He must not harm humans, but, because he has the unique ability to read minds, he knows that telling the truth will cause pain, but that lying also will also lead to unhappiness. It is as if he were forced to resolve the sentence “This statement is false.” If it is false, then it is true, but if it is true, then it is false.
Dr. Calvin, having been misled into a fraudulent hope about her chances with Ashe, takes special pleasure in destroying Herbie’s mind. All her pent-up resentment about being ignored by men floods out onto Herbie. It might be considered a form of murder, but Herbie is only a machine, so he does not count. Humans do not have to obey the robots’ First Law.
The stories are metaphors for real-world problems of social inequality. The robots are deliberately made to be subservient to humans, and their owners often treat them as inferior. Some characters address robots with the moniker “boy,” which echoes the language of Jim Crow and slavery, as when Bogert interviews a robot and says, “Sit down, boy” (137).
In 1950, when the I, Robot stories were written, some Caucasian Americans still addressed African American adult males in the same way. This is a blatant insult and an obvious attempt to maintain dominance over the other person; it became an issue in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Asimov contrasts this behavior toward robots with their obvious mental and moral superiority. It is an ironic comparison, a reminder that only the thin line of the Robots’ Second Law against disobedience separates the dominator from the dominated. It is also a symbolic warning about the artificial and unfair pecking order between Black and white people in 1950s America, an arrangement that could, and ultimately did, change.
Untethered from some restrictions of the First Law, Chapter 6’s Nestor robot gives Dr. Calvin the willies because such a loosening of the rules might lead to robots dominating humans. That said, full safety from dominance by super-smart machines is not as simple as imposing Asimov’s original Three Laws onto computers. The author himself believed the Laws would not fully protect humanity: The stories in I, Robot point out the glitches in the application of the laws that might cause a crisis.
The lost robot in Chapter 6 creates a mystery to solve. Mysteries are a favorite topic of the author, whose books often include crimes and detectives. Indeed, the Robot series features a human detective, Elijah Baley—who, with the assistance of Robot Daneel Olivaw, solves several murders and other mysteries.
Chapter 7’s spaceship contains a single gauge that reads off distances in parsecs. Astronomical distances are measured in light-years, the distance a beam of light can travel in a year, roughly six trillion miles. The ship’s gauge measures parsecs, a little more than three light-years. A million parsecs is more than the distance between our Milky Way and its sibling galaxy, Andromeda. The men travel 300,000 parsecs, or more than a million light-years, a distance that would take them clear outside the Milky Way.
With the hyperspace drive, “U. S. Robots has interstellar travel, and humanity has the opportunity for galactic empire” (169). Galactic empire is the subject of the author’s Empire and Foundation series, whose early books were published about the same time as I, Robot. (Study guides for the first books in the Foundation series are available at SuperSummary.com.)
Related Titles
By Isaac Asimov
