FICTIONAL FIGURE
Susan Calvin
Asimov's robopsychologist — the fictional archetype of the human expert whose job is to understand how machines fail, not to prevent them from failing. Her contemporary counterpart is the AI red-teamer, evaluator, and incident responder.
Susan Calvin (1982–2082 in Asimov's fictional timeline) is the central human character of the Robot stories. She is a robopsychologist — a discipline Asimov invented to describe the skill of predicting and diagnosing the behavior of positronic brains whose rule interactions are too complex for unaided human intuition. Her temperament is cold, her patience with fools is minimal, and her track record over a forty-year career is the only thing that prevents a series of near-catastrophic robot malfunctions from becoming actual catastrophes. She is Asimov's answer to the question: if intelligent systems will fail in unexpected ways, who catches the failures before they matter?
In The You On AI Field Guide
Calvin appears in most of the I, Robot stories and in later novels including The Caves of Steel's frame references and Robots and Empire. Her method is consistent across cases: given a robot exhibiting unexpected behavior, she reasons from the robot's perspective — what must