Are you trying to say I'm reading too much into a science fiction author's work? Maybe. It's fun to think about it. He wrote it for me to have fun with it, no?
I’m saying that he did not invent the rules to show what a flawed concept they were, nor for the purpose of social commentary. He merely wanted some simple rules so that robots could be considered “safe” by the world and characters in his stories.
The so-called “death of the author” may be a truth with regards to you want to believe that the stories are about, but when actual authorial intent is a documented fact, what the author intended is, IMHO, not up for interpretation.
> He merely wanted some simple rules so that robots could be considered “safe” by the world and characters in his stories.
On the contrary, the first story to feature the Three Laws had the laws conflict with reach other and render the robot useless.
The entire point of the story is the counterintuitively bad emergent result of sensible-looking rules governing behaviour.
Later stories repeated this, finding new entertaining and interesting scenarios that showed the inadequacy of the laws.
Other stories did have them as background lore. But they originated as the center of the story, and very effectively, as we are talking about them 80 years later!
Maybe from a purely literature analysis point of view you are correct. I wouldn't know, I didn't study literature analysis. But it feels like gatekeeping when you say I'm not allowed to interpret some science fiction story some way or another.
The so-called “death of the author” may be a truth with regards to you want to believe that the stories are about, but when actual authorial intent is a documented fact, what the author intended is, IMHO, not up for interpretation.