Robots

It took me a long time to realize that Poul Anderson's "Epilogue" is a robots story. First, we read Zero's point of view with only occasional clues as to his body shape. Then the human characters perceive him as a large metallic four-armed humanoid although his wife is a completely different shape. Next, it occurs to us and to them that the word, "robot," is applicable provided that this does not imply that organic beings have constructed Zero to serve them, to obey orders - even to obey the Three Laws - or to replace human workers. Zero was created in a solution inside another machine for no other purpose than the propagation of his species so he is not a robot in the original sense of "worker" but is in fact a hunter of other machines whose metal and reusable parts he needs for survival. This machine ecology was not constructed for any purpose but merely grew by natural selection. Robots in the original sense are three billion years in the past.

In "That Thou Art Mindful Of Him," one of Isaac Asimov's culminating Robots stories, human beings are designedly roboticizing the Terrestrial ecology with artificial worms, insects, birds etc but that is design, not natural selection. Anderson's Psychotechnic History includes one robot story in which the moral is that the first robot in the world is already redundant and unemployed although, at the same time, human labour is being displaced by high tech automation and computerization.