Runaround
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- This article is about the short story 'Runaround'. For the unrelated television show of the same name, see Runaround (TV show).
Runaround is a science-fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. It was written in October 1941 and first published in the March 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.
In 2015, Powell and Donovan and Robot SPD-13 (aka Speedy) are sent to restart operations at a mining station on Mercury that was abandoned ten years before. Speedy is sent to collect some selenium, required for the life support system, but doesn't return. Powell and Donovan use a more primitive robot to go to retrieve Speedy and try to analyse what happened to it. They find that its levels of obedience to two of the Three Laws of Robotics had reached an equilibrium, and it was running around in a circle maintaining this equilibrium value.
Many of the Asimov's robot stories explore the implications of the Laws of Robotics, although in Runaround the robot is actually following the Laws as they were intended. In others, ambiguities in the language are employed to achieve the desired effect: that the robot does what it was told, but not what was intended.