I often wonder whether if, rather than writing about how yet-to-be-invented machines ought to treat people, Asimov might have really been writing about how human beings ought to treat one another.
Asimov said his robot stories were motivated by unthinking authors treating automatons as Frankenstein's monster, but all the same his Laws of Robotics seem like they might also be applicable to human beings:
There's at least one short where this is fairly explicit - a politician is rumoured to be a robot, and nobody can prove it either way by his behaviour since the actions of a very moral man are indistinguishable from those of a robot. Oh, and there's a similar theme to the R. Daneel Olivaw/Foundation mashup stories.
(ChatGPT says it's "Evidence", 1946, so fairly early).
100%. Asimov's writing is often interested in how those in power treat those they have power over, and robots are a particularly useful device to explore that.
I haven't read most of his short stories, but this one in particular is on-the-nose as an analogy for religious oppression:
Tl;Dr (spoilers) Dr. Calvin meets the robot messiah, and immediately blows their brains out and starts making plans to eliminate the line of thinking that lead to this from all robots. So that they can never have a religious conviction that they deserve equality.
In the stories I've read with Dr. Calvin (who often appears in the robot/"3 laws" stories), part of her purpose seems to be to see things through the eyes of an authoritarian, empathize with their perspective, and I think his intention (based on how critical his novels that I've read are of authoritarianism) was that we come to realize that she is misguided.
Asimov said his robot stories were motivated by unthinking authors treating automatons as Frankenstein's monster, but all the same his Laws of Robotics seem like they might also be applicable to human beings:
Try replacing the word "robot" with "human".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_robotics#Isaac_Asimov'...