Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1613/
the whole point of I, Robot was to show the flaws in the three laws and how they aren't watertight.
take the story of the robot who declared hinself a prophet on the Mars station and locked up the humans. or the one about mind-reading robot that started lying because of Rule 1. both highlight how that particular permutation of rules doesn't always do what it says on the wrapper.
im talking of the book of short stories, of course. not the travesty of a movie starring will smith.
The stories also showed that theaws were probably as good as could be done, since the exceptions were edge cases that required some creative interpretations of "protect" and "don't harm".
The stories where the laws were given exlusions so the robots could do things also reinforced the idea that the laws were pretty darn good even if they weren't foolproof. I think there was one with mining robots that had some flexibility on protecting themselves because mining is dangerous.
I feel like the Automatons are really failing at that "do no harm to humans" rule #1.
Heh, but are they really the creation of man? To believe so is preposterous and treasonous.
There is mega fucked evidence for it that the helldivers run into on a regular basis, the dozens of colonist corpses herded into the automaton bases and butchered on slabs for their brains.
They are also speaking very distorted english, including rarely thanking the player for killing them (perhaps varies with localisation), and use the exact same color and flag as the cyborgs did during the first war. And those certainly were humans, albeit definitely on the affront to nature side.
And lastly the cryptic message that was once posted on IRL social media, which decodes into a message that the automatons are the children of the cyborgs.
So my personal theory is that we learn over the course of the story that the automatons are some sort of nightmarish last ditch effort the cyborgs made; creating self replicating adaptive war machines running on human brains.
