cross-posting to here as well for whoever finds this thread from pivot: please enjoy this unfortunate discovery that I stumbled upon yesterday
A remote servant, really? Is this how the tech bros aim to take the “illegal” out of “illegal Filipino domestic slave”?
If you don’t have to directly interact with the underclass it’s almost like you don’t have an underclass!
Next on your favourite murder show: rich asshole strangled by robot butler.
Wasn’t that just the plot of The Caves of Steel? Or Robots of Dawn, which combined it with some weird sex thing?
If I recall Asimov correctly The Caves of Steel was human killed because mistaken for robot.
Robots of Dawn was robot killed because weird sex hangups (don’t fuck the robot).
The Naked Sun I think is the one you are thinking about were robot killed human. Because reprogrammed to think human is robot or something like that.
In all cases the cop can eliminate all other options, and what remains blah blah. (Also does an inordinate amount of interstellar politics for a cop.)
In “Die, rich asshole, die” the plot will instead be that as the show goes on it turns out that everyone who has interacted with the victim has a motive, including the people on the other side of the planet he yells slurs at. Since they (for a pittance) operate the heavy machinery in his home that killed him, from a completely separate jurisdiction, the story takes a turn towards international relations. However, our protagonist gets a leak from a robot operator that anyone who knows the password can operate the robot if they know the password. All the robots are shipped with the password “password”.
Armed with this knowledge our protagonist goes to the hacker of bright hair colours and indeterminate gender. The hacker first laughs at the protagonist for not knowing the password in the first place - it was in a post that went viral on Tumblr - and then accesses the robot. It turns out that not only did everyone have a motive, everyone was trying to kill him using the robot. One was poisoning the coffee, another one the cocaine. One was trying to electrocute him in the pool, on getting the chandelier to fall on him and so on.
Finally, the hacker helps our protagonist to trace the IP of the person that operated the robot when it strangled the rich asshole. Turns out it was someone accessing robots for fun to pretend they had come to life. The rich, high, somewhat poisoned, victim fell for it and got horny. He begged to be strangled a bit and unfortunately the person controlling the robot complied, not understanding the strength of the robot. It was an accident after all.
Our protagonist pours a whiskey, looks into the camera and says that you got to know that both you and your partner know what you are doing if you engage in strangulation. Also, don’t be an asshole.
One was poisoning the coffee, another one the cocaine. One was trying to electrocute him in the pool, on getting the chandelier to fall on him and so on.
Hitman 4
Having read all the Asimov novels when I was younger…
spoiler
The Caves of Steel: human killed because he was mistaken for the android that he built in his own image.
The Robots of Dawn: robot killed (positronic brain essentially bricked) to prevent it from revealing the secrets of how to build robots that can pass for human. It had been a human’s sex partner, but that wasn’t the motive. No one thought banging a robot was that strange; the only thing that perturbed them was the human getting emotional fulfillment from it (the planet Aurora is a decadent world where sex is for entertainment and fashion, not relationships).
The Naked Sun: the villain manipulates robots to commit crimes by having multiple robots each do a part of the task, so that the “a robot shall not harm a human being” software directive is never activated. He tries to poison a man by having one robot dose a water carafe and another unknowingly pour from it, but being a poisoning noob, he screws up the dosage and the victim lives. His only successful murder involves a human as well; he programs a robot to hand a blunt object to a human during a violent quarrel with the intended victim.
Talk about ripped from the headlines!
holy shit
A humanoid robot with a cloth cover feels really iffy. That thing will smell like hell.
I just bought a humanoid robot servant! I also got a machine that lets her do chores in my house.
