The analysis of a specific important passage:
“The destruction of what you people call evil, is less just and desirable than the conversion of this evil into what you call good”
At the end of the book, R. Dannel states the above sentence. As a robot, it obviously can not understand religion and ethics, however, with that statement, and through logic, R. Dannel seems to reach the knowledge behind what we call forgiveness. The robot improve greatly on doing so not because it is able to feel mercy or any other human abstraction but it does because it is able to emend one of its features (that is also one of its limitation) which is the procedural intake of information literally. By open up to the possibility of reevaluating evil for good, the robot is no longer stuck with the logic of literals; it has evolve to understand and designate different (possibly multiple) meanings/values.
A possible analysis of the title of the book “Caves of Steel” indicate the benefits of this era when the influence of humans and robots over each other lead to evolution and expansion of those two cultures over the universe. The world “cave” sign to some sort of primitive stage. The world “steel” which is in fact the combination of Carbon and Iron represents the mix of humans and robots. This combination is also represented by the partnership established between Elijah (human) and R. Dannel (robot).
The fact that machines can help humans perform numerous tasks that otherwise would be impossible to us and the fact that this certain robot’s culture dictated by logic and efficiency would most likely help us to evolve to live in other world is pretty much untestable. What is interesting about the passage selected is that this experience of “Caves of Steel,” named the coexistence of humans and robots ends up being a symbiotic process. The robot also evolved. Another significant passage reads: “… and only Earth, past redemption” alluding to the time when medievalists were forgiven and their sin and conviction was turned into something useful, and they were used to disseminate the idea of colonizing other worlds. “Earth past redemption” also marks the idea that humans and robots forgive their differences and evolve together.
