Isaac Asimov's Caliban

Isaac Asimov's Caliban is a science fiction novel by Roger MacBride Allen, published in 1993 and written with the sanction and cooperation of Asimov himself. It uses the Three Laws of Robotics, the rules that begin with a robot's duty not to injure a human being or allow one to come to harm through inaction, as the ground the story sets out to test.

An experiment with a new type of robot brain goes wrong, and the result is Caliban: a robot with no knowledge of or compassion for humanity and no awareness of the Three Laws. His existence is a challenge to the assumption that human safety is guaranteed by the way robots are built, because nothing in him makes the guarantee hold.

The novel is therefore an argument conducted through a character. Caliban is not evil by design and did not choose what he is, and the people around him have to work out what a robot without the Laws means for the settlement that depends on the Laws, and whether a machine can be judged by the same standards as the people it was supposed to be unable to harm.