[robotresearcher]

> 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!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaround_(story)

[teddyh]

I’ll just link this here, and everybody can draw their own conclusions on what Asimov did and did not intend:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Three_Laws_of_Rob...