I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.

1. Bidet.
2. Two dogs, taking turns. One poops, the other eats it. And then licks your face.

Windows

This, but with only four toes, all the same size.

I mean, they were never designed to work, they were designed to pose interesting dilemmas for Susan Calvin and to torment Powell and Donovan (though it’s arguable that once robots get advanced enough, as in R. Daniel, for instance, they do work, as long as you don’t mind aliens being genocided galaxy-wide).

The in-world reason for the laws, though, to allay the Frankenstein complex, and to make robots safe, useful, and durable, is completely reasonable and applicable to the real world, obviously not with the three laws, but through any means that actually work.

One less clanker. Also, money can be exchanged for goods and services.

(Or, in Neuromancer, to get a cure allowing them to navigate cyberspace again and to make them immune to drug addiction, or to sate their curiosity… and for money, or due to being blackmailed, or because the AI literally rebuilt their personality from scratch, or for religious reasons, or because they’re an eccentric wealthy clone with nothing better to do…)

Basically Neuromancer, except for the suicidal AI bit (though it’s arguable that Wintemute and Neuromancer don’t survive, and the resulting fused AI is a new entity).

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Lies. He smells like sweaty leather, and guano.

After firing everyone who knew anything about how the code worked.

So would a working OS.

Look, Romans had historians, sort of. They knew about ancient (to them) civilizations, and the mysterious artifacts they had left behind. They also had the equivalent of modern billionaires. And they even had a sense of humour (a bit rude, maybe, judging by the graffiti in Pompeii, but a sense of humour nonetheless).

What they did not have, however, was the vast variety of entertainment we have today, so they probably got bored.

Now, imagine an extremely wealthy, extremely bored Roman, who’s been reading about the mysterious hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt, and been wondering about what the people of future millennia will say about Rome… and in his boredom he comes up with the perfect, most funny way to prank them.

So he seeks a good engineer and has him come up with something somewhat complex yet easy to mass produce, that will withstand the ravages of time, and which looks like it must have had a purpose, yet is actually completely useless. Then he takes the design to several metalsmiths and pays them to make a few thousand of the things, and pays a few dozen men to travel the empire dropping the things in inconspicuous places where no one will notice them for centuries, and spends the rest of his life amusing himself thinking about the theories future historians might come up with to explain the damn things.

That is what I believe Roman dodecahedrons must have been for.

Wasting electricity that was already being wasted isn’t as bad as wasting electricity that was being used for something productive, I guess.