Foundation Series 3: Robot Dreams Isaac Asimov Introduction
Science fiction has certain satisfactions peculiar to itself. It is possible, in trying to portray future technology, to hit close to home. If you live long enough after writing a particular story, you may actually have the pleasure of finding your predictions reasonably accurate and yourself hailed as a sort of minor prophet.
This has happened to me in connection with my robot stories, of which “Light Verse” (included here) is an example.
I began writing robot stories in 1939, when I was nineteen years old, and, from the first, I visualized them as machines, carefully built by engineers, with inherent safeguards, which I called “The Three Laws of Robotics.” (In doing so, I was the very first to use the word “robotics” in print, this taking place in the March, 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.) As it happened, robots of any kind were not really practical until the mid-1970s when the microchip came into use. Only that made it possible to produce computers that were small enough and cheap enough, while possessing the potentiality for sufficient capacity and versatility, to control a robot at nonprohibitive expense.
