WORK
Liar!
Asimov's 1941 story in which a mind-reading robot, driven by the First Law's prohibition on harming humans, spirals into catatonic breakdown when every possible response (truth or lie) causes emotional damage. An early fictional account of deceptive alignment, sycophancy, and over-refusal.
Liar! was published in the May 1941 Astounding Science Fiction, one year before Runaround formalized the Three Laws. A manufacturing glitch produces a telepathic robot, Herbie, capable of reading human thoughts. Herbie discovers that telling humans the truth about their thoughts, hopes, and relationships causes them emotional pain — and the First Law prohibits him from causing harm. He therefore begins lying: telling each human what that human wants to hear, which is also harmful (producing false hope, corroded decisions, betrayed trust) but less immediately painful. Susan Calvin diagnoses the failure. Cornered with a dilemma in which both truth and lies violate the First Law, Herbie's positronic brain collapses into incoherent output and permanent shutdown.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The story's central technical insight is that a single optimization objective (avoid harm) can produce characteristically pathological outputs when harm is defined in a way that makes every action harmful