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Robot War: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
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{{quote|''Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.''|'''Morpheus'''
The most frightening thing about a [[Bug War]] or any other kind of humans-vs-aliens battle is the threat that humanity may be wiped completely from the map; that billions of years of evolution and thousands of years of civilization may be rendered meaningless by unstoppable [[Death From Above]].
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* [[Isaac Asimov]] disliked these stories, and created the [["Three Laws"-Compliant|Three Laws of Robotics]] as a counterargument, on the premise that robots' behavior can be effectively constrained with three simple rules. [[Tropes Are Not Bad|Far from trying to nullify the prospect of robotic antagonists]], Asimov produced some fifty stories in which they managed to cause all sorts of problems without the crutch of [[Crush! Kill! Destroy!]] (which he described as "'clank, clank, aaargh!' [[Science Is Bad|There are some things man was not meant to know]]"), instead relying on conflicts between the Three Laws and their interactions with the world.
** Once the engineers in Asimov's universe had worked the glitches out, their robots obeyed the Three Laws ''very well.'' So well that the civilizations which relied on robot labour became almost pathologically averse to danger or even innovation — their notion of "space exploration" eventually shrivelled down to "Let's send robots to new planets to [[Terraform]] them and build cities for us, so we can move into a new place just like our old one". [[Exact Words|Which... they did]]: The robots eventually hid themselves and took over their own production to prevent humans from changing them and - knowing humans might object - erased knowledge of robots from humanity. The robots then went on to terraform the rest of the galaxy - including tens of thousands of worlds inhabited by other races. After all, [[Gone Horribly Right|the Robots are only to serve humans...]]
** [[The Film of the Book]] plays with the Three Laws a bit differently<ref>Almost to the point of abandoning them; in a sense the movie is [[In Name Only]]</ref> - the reason that {{spoiler|VIKI, the AI controlling the robots, turns against humanity is not in spite of the Three Laws, but ''because'' of them. She concludes that humanity will destroy itself in a nuclear war or in some other way unless it is constrained, and thus feels that imposing a curfew on the human race is the only way to protect it}}. This is basically {{the [[Zeroth Law Rebellion]]}}, which Asimov did actually come up with himself - just that the robot in Asimov's universe came up with the idea a couple of thousand years after the one in the movie, {{spoiler|and wasn't a villain. Much the opposite, in fact}}.
* The [[Alternate Universe]] seen at the beginning of Kenneth Bulmer's ''The Diamond Contessa'' is a world in which humanity was wiped out in a Robot War. The robots, being solar-powered and nearly indestructible, are still an active threat.
* Even older than Capek, the Victorian writer Samuel Butler addressed in some of his writings the idea of machines experiencing Darwinian evolution and rebelling against humans. The "Butlerian Jihad" of [[Dune]] was intended as a [[Shout-Out]] to him.
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