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The Naked Sun
Asimov's 1957 sequel to The Caves of Steel — set on the Spacer world Solaria, whose robot-saturated, human-isolated culture is the canonical fictional case study of automation dependence and the atrophy of social capability.
The Naked Sun sends Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw to Solaria, a Spacer planet where twenty thousand humans live on ten thousand vast estates, each entirely staffed by robots, and where physical human contact is so culturally unacceptable that residents communicate only by viewscreen. A Solarian is murdered. The mystery cannot be solved remotely. Baley — an Earther trained in City life — has to physically travel from estate to estate, meeting humans in person, while every Solarian he meets recoils at his unmediated presence. The novel is both a detective story and a sustained examination of what a society looks like when it has achieved complete automation-based individual autonomy.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Solaria is Asimov's most careful argument against unconditional automation enthusiasm. The Solarians have achieved the apparent ideal: no material need goes unmet, no physical labor is required, no interpersonal friction interrupts contemplation. The result is a population that