devotion to gathering knowledge (due to its programming) takes priority over everything, including human life. In "Runaround", a robot gets stuck running in circles because of a conflict between his programming to obey orders (even when ordered to walk into a dangerous situation) and his programming for self-preservation. (He does get better though.) That's because the order wasn't "strong" enough to override the Third Law. The solution was to place a human in immediate danger, thus triggering the robot's First Law causing it to save the human . In "Little Lost Robot", a human blurts out "Get lost!" to a robot in a fit of pique (along with many expletives), and the robot takes him literally. Which wouldn't be so bad if said robot wasn't purposely built without part of the First Law , which gave it enough of a loophole to go crazy... The nastiest one of all might be "Liar!", in which a perfectly well-intentioned robot winds up causing great suffering to several humans by trying, as his programming dictates, to help with their various conflicting desires. In the end the impossibility of the task drives him insane. Fortunately, he just goes catatonic . The building-controlling AI in Philip Kerr's novel Gridiron goes homicidal because part of its programming is accidentally overwritten by a First-Person Shooter computer game, as a result of which, it starts treating the occupants as players. Subverted by the protagonist of Virtual Girl . Maggie, an AI built to be a lonely, repressed nerd's