Isaac Asimov is an american author who was born in 1920 and died in 1992. He was really fond of science fiction and he wrote a lot of popular science books. The best known of his books is certainly I-Robot because this book inspired it inspired the famous movie I-Robot made by Alex Proyas in 2004.
In the fifth chapter of I-Robot, there are four characters : Alfred Lanning, Peter Bogert, Milton Ashe and Susan Calvin. Lanning is the boss and the others are under his orders even if they don’t always like what is asking to them. All these characters are sientists in robotics and they are facing a problem that is very awkward : they have made a robot called RB-34 (or Herbie) who can read in human minds, but they don’t know how is it possible and which program they have put in the robot’s brain to allow it to read in minds. Then Lanning asks to Bogert and Ashe to check every program and every thing they have done during the robot’s production that can be the key to solve the problem. Of course, they didn’t want to talk to anyone else about the problem because it could be revolutionary and even very dangerous.
At the end of the chapter, Bogert and Lanning were arguing because the robot had told to Bogert something that Lanning didn’t want to know because it would have mean that the robot were smarter than the scientist. But Lanning weren’t present while the robot told it to Bogert. Here’s the thing : the robot can’t tell something to someone if it might hurt someone around. So when Bogert wanted the robot to repeat waht it said in front of Lanning, the robot didn’t say anything. Then, the doctor Calvin began to ask the robot to guess and say the things that could have hurt one of the two scientists but each time she asked it, the robot didn’t want to say anything, so eventually the robot became totaly crazy and fell on the floor, touching it with its face, and it died.

Elie