Talk:I, Robot (Cory Doctorow)

Novels: Short story / Sci-fi Low‑importance

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Background[edit]

The story is set in the type of police state needed to ensure that only one company is allowed to make robots, and only one type of robot is allowed.

So, it was a totalitarian police state which made all IBM-compatible personal computers ship with MS-DOS? A police state established Standard Oil and Ma Bell? Yes, it was Big Brother who decreed that all screws be machined with a right-hand screw thread. Anville 17:35, 27 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In his introduction in Overclocked, Doctorow wrote "I was struck immediately by one of the thin places in Asimov's world-building: how could you have a society where only one company was allowed to make only one kind of robot?"

Your examples are mostly of temporary monopolies - either competition or regulation ended them. In Asimov robot series, the monoploy continued for centuries. How did they maintain that ? -- Beardo (talk) 17:38, 8 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]