The Positronic Man

Un nou-născut crede că el reprezintă întregul univers, dar greșește - așa cum își dă seama destul de repede. De aceea, el trebuie să studieze lumea exterioară lui - trebuie să încerce să învețe unde se află granițele dintre persoana sa și restul lumii - pentru a putea înțelege cine este și cum se cuvine să-și ducă viața.

They have all let me do what I felt I needed to do, Andrew thought, even when they privately disagreed with it. They have granted me my wishes-- out of love for me. Yes, love. For a robot.

They have all let me do what I delt I needed to do, Anfew thought, even when they privately disagreed with it. THey have granted me my wishes-- out of love for me. Yes, love. For a robot.

No, he would simply go to town and use the public library. That was the proper self-reliant thing to do-- the correct way for a free robot to handle a problem, he told himself. … To the library, yes. And he would dress for the occasion. Yes. Yes. Humans did not enter the public library unclothed. Neither would he.

Freedom is a priceless thing, Sir," Andrew said. "And the chance of gaining my freedom is worth any amount of money that I may possess.

...Of course, he'll have to begin filing income tax returns. But the revenue people aren't going to come around to find out whether Taxpayer Andrew Martin is a human being or not. All they'll care about is whether Taxpayer Andrew Martine pays his taxes on time.

Though only a robot, he had known the continuity and stability of family life; he had known warmth; he had known love.

What I have done is to choose between the death of my body and the death of my aspirations and desires. To have let my body live at the cost of the greater death - That is the true violation of the Third Law. Not this. As a robot I might live forever, yes. But I tell you that I would rather die as a man than live eternally as a robot.

Andrew thought that it was strange that humans would choose the day of coming forth from the womb as the significant thing to commemorate. He knew something of human biology, and it seemed to him that it would be much more important to focus on the moment of the actual creation of the organism, when the sperm cell entered the ovum and the process of cell division began. Surely that was the real point of origin of any person! Certainly the new person was already alive - if not capable of independent functioning - during the nine months spent within the womb.