I Robot Final

Kyle Noonan

My favorite robot in the book was SPD13 or “speedy.” In his chapter Michael and Donavan are two scientists sent to the mercury-mining base just to make sure everything is running correctly. To run the base they need an ore called Selenium, but because Mercury is so hot they have to send their robot speedy out for it. After several hours they realize that speedy has not returned from the job that should only have taken an hour or so.

They know that they will die if they do not find speedy. So they locate him on the satellites and find out that he is just circling the pools of selenium in an oval shape. They don’t understand at first what is going on so they set out with two very old robots to try and catch him. When they get out there they guess that the reason that speedy is circling the pool because they didn’t stress how urgent it was that speedy gets the selenium, so speedy is having a conflict between the second and third laws of robotics. The fist thing they try to get him back is to increase the factor of the second law by intentionally causing harm to speedy. They do this by having the old robots toss jars of carbon dioxide at speedy witch will not harm him much but might snap him out of it.

It doesn’t work. They go back to the lab after that to try and find another alternative but none can be found until Donovan comes up with an idea that he won’t tell Michael. After they return to the mountain side near speedy Donovan dismounts his robot and runs off towards speedy. After a little while the old robot comes to life with ought its human counter part in an attempt to save him. Donovan realizes that if the old robot makes it to him and tries to pull him back the old robot will be too slow and he will surely die. So he starts screaming to speedy to help him. This instantly snaps speedy out of his trance and he comes back to save Donovan. After Donovan wakes up Michael tells him that he is perfectly fine and he has sent speedy off again but with this time orders to get the selenium by all means necessary.

I think that this chapter tells how all things have an extreme will to live. This is shown how even though the laws are being conflicted speedy still wants to live so as he nears the pool to complete his goal the gas around the pool starts to “hurt” him and his will to live set in. Just like any human, say if bob was working in a nuclear power plant and they told him that he has to extract the radioactive core with ought a hazmat suit on, Bob wont do it because of his will to live, but if they told Bob that if he did not get that core out in time the entire earth will be destroyed then he would be in and out with that core faster than anything. So this chapter also shows a little how robots are kind of like humans, and that is why this chapter is my favorite.