Little Lost Robot

I was looking for adaptations of Issac Asimov's stories and found this. Since I liked his book I Robot, I was interested in seeing a televised version of any of the stories included in the book and was rather disappointed to find that only a few exist. WIth the limitations of the apparent budget this series had, I can say that they succeeded in telling the same story found in the book. Unfortunately, the story itself might not be the best choice to make an episode from and was rather dull as result. It does not help that the robots depicted here are stiff, boring, and overall uninteresting. If you are a fan of Asimov or the short story, you might find this amusing.

I saw this on ITV's Out of this World series when I was 11. It was in flickering black and white and seemed really spooky and just like the stories in 'I Robot.' The intro music to the Out of This World series set the theme and the Boris Karloff intro was, if I remember, a bit eerily over the top. Re-reading the Asimov books again, they retain that 'sepia-tint' "could be 'Forties could be 'Fifties" 'nether-world', something that the recent I Robot film missed completely. Killing off Alfred Lanning in the first reel was a classic screw-up and lost the plot, never mind the robot. Where were Peter Bogert, Donovan and Powell for instance. Hell's teeth, the book REVOLVES around their activities and antics. Stephen Byerley doesn't even get a look-in. The film-makers went for style over substance (unlike ITV who tried to stick to the story within the limits of 1960's TV technology.) The 2004 version completely lost that 'spookiness' and pulp-SciFi ambiance that I Robot has on every page.

Told to "Get lost", a robot does so by mingling in with a group of 20 other identical robots. Unfortunately, as this particular robot has had its 'First Law' modified to allow it to permit a human to come to harm, and so must be found. Like a number of Asimov's 'robot' stories, this tale involves solving a problem generated by a robot behaving in a way that is ostensibly contrary to the author's iconic 'Three Laws of Robotics' but lacks the cleverness of the original short story (notably, there is no explanation of the rogue robot's final actions and the real problem of having robots that can allow a human to come to harm is never addressed (especially considering the space-station's logic behind bypassing this part of Law 1 is sound)). Maxine Audley is good as robot guru Dr. Susan Calvin but the rest of the characters are simply ciphers (Gerald Flood is particularly weak as robot hating Black). The robots themselves are awkward and cheap-looking, and some level of suspension of disbelief is required to imagine them moving fast enough to pass/fail the elaborate tests set up to identify the modified tinman. Worth watching as the only surviving episode of the early British sci-fi anthology and for the few minutes you get to spend with the great Boris Karloff.

This Isaac Asimov story is set in 2039, when robots will become common place in society. It was originally made for British television and according to IMDB, it's the only episode of "Out of This World" which survives.

A scientist is working and a robot keeps hovering nearby. Without thinking, he tells the robot to 'get lost'...and the robot literally does that. In other words, he disappears and his exact whereabouts are unknown. This is a particularly bad problem as this robot is unique...the first law of robotics has been modified. Instead of 'A robot cannot allow a human to be harmed' to 'A robot cannot actively cause harm to a human'. And, everyone is worried as the robot looks exactly like the rest...and singling out the disappeared robot is no easy task for Dr. Susan Calvin.

This is a decent but unremarkable show. In some ways, it is very good...such as the costumes. But bland sets and a general slowness and sterility of the film make it a lot less entertaining than it should have been.

This British adaptation of an Isaac Asimov short story is not contingent on action or production value, but instead retains a story of ideas involving intellectual experiments. I found it fascinating and compelling on first viewing, 62 years after broadcast.

The British approach helps immeasurably, because the underlying stress on a class system and of course Colonialism lends a piquant aspect to the drama. Man versus robot of course intrinsically deals with domination versus submission, and the story revolves upon man's arrogance, feeling of superiority and above all being prone to error, none of which directly affect robots.

Asimov postulated his Laws of Robotics not only to facilitate storytelling (by carefully limiting possibilities rather than leave room for the often silliness of unbridled fantasy) as well as to provide a useful framework for real-life developments in the scientific field. For the past year or so, AI (or as we always referred to it at Google over the years, Machine Learning) has entered the popular consciousness (pun intended), and it is fascinating how the inherent dangers in the field were at first paramount and scary in coverage of the subject, yet very soon outweighed by avarice, as the trillions of dollars of expected AI-generated profits caused investors (or to use a more accurate in this case, British term "punters") to speculatively pump up the value of stocks like Nvidia, GOOG/GOOGL and Meta to new highs, before quickly dumping them when the speedy real-world excess profit was not forthcoming.

In this story, an interstellar science project begun in 2019 (a bit too ambitious in the fictional time-line) has hit a snag on a Saturn outpost due to sloppiness by an engineer named Black (overplayed by sinister-looking obscure actor Gerald Flood) dealing with a robot in the project whose Positronic brain had been modified to overrule the First Law of Robotics. Namely, this robot did not have to act to protect human life. The robot was ordered by Black to "get lost!", and is hiding now amidst a group of 20 new identical (but unmodified) robots needed to be shipped out as a crucial part of the project.

A psychologist specializing in the field of robots, played by cooly sexy Maxine Audley, has been summoned from Earth to deal with the situation -she arranges experiments to weed out the rogue robot from among the other 20 by outwitting the mechanical beings. Inherent throughout the story is all the humans' feeling of superiority over the robots they call Nesters, and what makes it suspenseful and intriguing is the viewer's knowledge that the superiority is likely an illusion, a conceit of mankind.

The result could very well have been a radio play, as it doesn't depend upon special effedts or cinematics. Though there's sinister music, and the spookiess of the robots' calm stillness, I found myself very soon rooting for them and not the human cast. Adding to that is the fact that Audley by virtue of her job and exposure to robots, is quite sympathetic to their plight, while dogged in her attempt to outwit them -that's her job!

Other than Flood, the acting is fine, and the plot twists fascinating in this highly cerebral exercise. It provides food for thought, and left me even more apprehensive about what Machine Learning/Ai will lead to as the current Genie out of the bottle (or toothpaste out of the tube, take your pick of dumb analogies).