Another one of the geek-classics that I had never read before. I did watch the movie with Will Smith and my copy even has his face on it (it was a present), but
1. the movie mostly deals with stuff from another Asimov-Book called "The caves of steel"
2. Asimov is actually great to read, even if you heard about the three laws of robotics over and over

This book is a bunch of short stories that are told by Dr. Susan Calvin, the greatest robopsychologist of her time. She witnessed the great advances of U.S. Robotics in the 21st century, to the point where the fate of humanity lies in the hand of machines. Every short story has another robot as "hero".

The first story is actually located in 1996 and tells of "Robby", one of the first robot nursemaids. He can't speak yet but he's the best friend of a little girl.

Astonishing about Asimov is not only how precise a lot of his predictions are (think about that speech is no simple problem - thousands of scientists after him didn't get that).
He really had a feeling for the nature of the human-robotic relation. Most of the time, the humans in these stories are wondering why the robot would behave like it does. In a programmers term, they are debugging. Asimov saw that this would be how engineers would spend most of their time *before there were computer programs*.

That's really remarkable.

P.S.:
In related news, South Korea is working on a set of guiding principles for the use of robots. They will most likely reflect Asimovs three laws. We always suspected this ould happen.
So if you want to know about the future, read this book.