With un-tethered mass-produced humanoid robots on the horizon of the real-world, I thought I might have a go at revisiting Asimov’s “Robot” stories, not having re-read them for so long that I’ve forgotten them. Other than to recall that they were enjoyable.

There turn out to have been a lot of them, written over the years. 31 by 1982, which was when we had The Complete Robot collection. More later.

I don’t wish to repeat the completist effort that was trying to read all Asimov’s Foundation novels, including the later ‘leads in’ and ‘lead outs’. Thus, a ‘best of’ selection is required for the robots.

After some research, I find that the widely-agreed must-read ‘best’ boil down to just nine…

“Runaround” (starter story) (IN: I, ROBOT);
“Little Lost Robot” (IN: I, ROBOT);
“Bicentennial Man” (IN: ROBOT VISIONS);
“Liar!” (IN: I, ROBOT);
“The Tercentenary Incident” (IN: THE COMPLETE ROBOT);
“The Evitable Conflict” (IN: I, ROBOT);
“Evidence” (IN: ROBOT VISIONS);
“Reason” (IN: ROBOT VISIONS);
“Someday” (IN: ROBOT VISIONS).

In audio, that’s just over eight hours.

And if one then wants more, the novels The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire follow these stories, in Asimov-time.

After that, in Asimov-time, you’re into the other two Empire novels, then the Foundation novels.

Nvidia has released “Chat with RTX” for free. Not a Cloud thing, it seems. You download it as an .EXE and run it on your PC. Though still a bit ‘rough around the edges’, it gives you a local…

AI chatbot you can customize by training it on your private local data. It works offline and is optimized to use Nvidia RTX graphics cards in PCs, for performance boosts in processing chat queries.

Theoretically then, this could make a private ‘Lovecraft bot’, provided there’s no cap on the size of the training data. A ‘HPLovebot’ trained on his writings, publications, essays, and vast numbers of letters (if one took the time to scan and OCR them all). In fact, since Hippocampus has most of that already in digital format, they might make a bundle of money by doing just that and providing it as an online ‘Chat with Lovecraft’ service. Or even for free, with ads for their books alongside. With them and Joshi behind it, it would probably also crowdfund in a few minutes.

Ideally the bot would have the ability to answer in a chronologically-aware way. “Well, in my youth my opinions on what you ask were such-and-such, but as I aged and matured my opinions became more so-and-so.” Something like that.

Regrettably, as well as a modern RTX 30 or 40 series graphics card, “Chat with RTX” also requires Windows 11 to build the bot. At least that’s what the specs say.