Quote:
Originally Posted by Kaisos Erranon
Actually, it would (and often is), since First Law and all. Just sayin'.  |
Well, the Laws of Robotics are sort of the mystery themselves in Asimov's books.
If you haven't read them, it pretty much always comes down to: Elijah Bailey and his robotic partner R. Daneel Olivaw are called somewhere to solve a mystery which everyone thinks a robot committed. It should, of course, be impossible for this to be so, since a robot's programming prohibits it from harming a human or allowing a human to come to harm.
Asimov's laws may as well be red truth (except when he decides they aren't, anyway...). The solution often relies on some twist in the laws which permit robots to act in an unusual manner, though they are almost never the actual culprits (the "robots seemingly breaking their laws" thing is in all of Asimov's robot works, not just the mysteries). Still, they are quite often manipulated (though not as badly as with the Zeroth Law).
It's similar to a closed room mystery, but it's more of a "closed motive" mystery; we're shown a suspect and given a reason why they killed, then told outright that it is impossible for that suspect to have killed. Naturally, there are really only two ways this gets resolved in general: The suspect isn't the killer, or the "prohibition" on their actions is not as restrictive as it appears to be.
EDIT: Actually, the whole "servant can't do it" vs. "yes, but what if it's more than a mere servant" thing in ep7 mirrors parts of Asimov's robot mysteries exactly, although I don't believe any of them relied on a robot thinking it was human. There was definitely some "Laws of Robotics evasion" in the same sense some of the red text is dodged.