On a snowy January day in 1920, in a tiny Russian village called Petrovichi, a baby named Isaac Asimov was born above a candy shop. Three years later his family packed up and moved to Brooklyn, New York, where his parents ran their own candy and newspaper store. Young Isaac was supposed to be selling gum - instead he was secretly reading every science-fiction magazine on the rack.
By age eleven he was writing his own stories on a beat-up typewriter. By nineteen he had sold his first one. He went on to become a real-life biochemistry professor at Boston University, but his head was always somewhere among the stars. In 1942 he wrote down something called the Three Laws of Robotics - rules that imaginary robots had to obey so they would not harm humans. Real engineers had not even built a useful robot yet, but Asimov had already figured out the safety manual.
By the time he died in 1992, Asimov had written or edited around 500 books, on everything from Shakespeare to black holes. Modern roboticists, software engineers, and AI researchers still argue about his Three Laws today. Movies like I, Robot borrow straight from his pages. Whenever someone asks whether a smart machine should be allowed to do something risky, they are basically asking a question that a candy-shop kid from Brooklyn started asking nearly a century ago.
