I, Robot: Introduction Summary & Analysis

The unnamed narrator, a reporter from the Interplanetary Press, has spent three days at U.S. Robots, and surveys the notes he’s taken from interviewing Dr. Susan Calvin. She was born in 1982 and is now 75—the same age as the company for which she works, U.S. Robot and Mechanical Men. She is a “frosty girl” who protects herself from the world with a “mask-like expression and a hypertrophy of intellect.”

The “calculating machines” created in the mid-20th century had been completely outdone by a man named Lawrence Robertson, who created the positronic brain. Calvin learned to construct those “brains,” obtaining a Ph.D. in 2008 and joining U.S. Robots as a “Robopsychologist.” For 50 years, the reporter describes, she “watched the direction of human progress change—and leap ahead.”

Calvin is retiring, and the reporter wants to do a story on her time at U.S. Robots to get the “human-interest angle.” Calvin scoffs at this comment, saying that many people call her a robot herself. She asks the narrator how old he is. When he tells her he is 32, she notes that he wouldn’t remember a world without robots. She states that they are “a cleaner better breed” than humans.

Calvin begins recounting some of the history of robots as she has experienced it, starting from the year before she joined the company. At that time, robots could not talk, but when they became more human, opposition began from labor unions and segments of religious organizations. She starts to relate the case of Robbie, a non-vocal robot who was made and sold in 1996 as a nursemaid.