And still Herbie’s unblinking eyes stared into hers and their dull red seemed to expand into dimly-shining nightmarish globes.
He was speaking, and she felt the cold glass pressing against her lips. She swallowed and shuddered into a certain awareness of her surroundings.
Still Herbie spoke, and there was an agitation in his voice—as if he were hurt and frightened and pleading.
The words were beginning to make sense. “This is a dream,” he was saying, “and you mustn’t believe in it. You’ll wake into the real world soon and laugh at yourself. He loves you, I tell you. He does, he does! But not here! Not now! This is all illusion.”
Susan Calvin nodded, her voice a whisper, “Yes! Yes!” She was clutching Herbie’s arm, clinging to it, repeating over and over, “It isn’t true, is it? It isn’t, is it?”
Just how she came to her senses, she never knew—but it was like passing from a world of misty unreality to one of harsh sunlight. She pushed him away from her, pushed hard against that steely arm, and her eyes were wide.
“What are you trying to do?” Her voice rose to a harsh scream. “What are you trying to do?”
Herbie backed away, “I want to help.”
The psychologist stared, “Help? By telling me this is a dream? By trying to push me into schizophrenia?” A hysterical tenseness seized her, “This is no dream! I wish it were!”
I think The Whispering Earring is a fundamentally different thing—its broad message is “automation will atrophy the skills that make us human”, which is a pretty common message in sci-fi, and distinct from “isolation from human feedback will remove a necessary check on our worst impulses”, which I think is what OP was asking about.
Reason, as far as I know, is about robots attributing religious significance to their designated function. I don’t think it fits either. It’s an interesting take on aligning superficially human-like AI, though.
Robbie is closer, in that it broaches the idea of isolation from human interaction, but Mrs. Weston is portrayed as being in the wrong for disrupting a genuine friendship between her daughter and the robot.
To answer OP’s question, The Veldt is the closest thing that comes immediately to mind. Children raised by a machine-nursery become obsessed with the instant gratification it provides, and develop dangerously uncanny behavior as a result.
In Reason the religious robot at one point starts to convince the human engineers that maybe the religious robot is right, but in the end the human engineers hold onto to their priors that humans created robots.
Why… would someone downvote this? Disagreement-votes seem totally fine, but it seems like someone just trying to honestly answer the question in a reasonable-ish way?
The Whispering Earring is in that direction. The “Robbie” and “Reason” short stories from I, Robot are also similar. That’s the best I have.
You picked the wrong stories from I, Robot! “Liar!” is a great match.
I think The Whispering Earring is a fundamentally different thing—its broad message is “automation will atrophy the skills that make us human”, which is a pretty common message in sci-fi, and distinct from “isolation from human feedback will remove a necessary check on our worst impulses”, which I think is what OP was asking about.
Reason, as far as I know, is about robots attributing religious significance to their designated function. I don’t think it fits either. It’s an interesting take on aligning superficially human-like AI, though.
Robbie is closer, in that it broaches the idea of isolation from human interaction, but Mrs. Weston is portrayed as being in the wrong for disrupting a genuine friendship between her daughter and the robot.
To answer OP’s question, The Veldt is the closest thing that comes immediately to mind. Children raised by a machine-nursery become obsessed with the instant gratification it provides, and develop dangerously uncanny behavior as a result.
In Reason the religious robot at one point starts to convince the human engineers that maybe the religious robot is right, but in the end the human engineers hold onto to their priors that humans created robots.
Why… would someone downvote this? Disagreement-votes seem totally fine, but it seems like someone just trying to honestly answer the question in a reasonable-ish way?
I downvoted my own answer because it wasn’t very good, relative to later answers.
Lol, I guess, fair enough.