5x17 First Law

Trivia

• The episode title and other elements of the story are both based on the robot stories of the late Isaac Asimov. The First Law of Robotics is, "No robot may harm a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." The AI program is named Bailey and Daniel Robertson's password used in the opening scene is Daniel R. Olivaw. Elijah Bailey and R. Daneel Olivaw are the main characters in the Asimov novels The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. The 'R' in Olivaw's name stands for 'robot'.
• The name of the company developing the AI, "Steel Cave," is a reference to one of the Asimov Robot Novels, "Caves of Steel".
• At the end of the episode, the DARPA official cites figures claiming that dropping the atomic bombs on Japan during WWII brought an early end of the war and saved an estimated four to five million Allied casualties that would have occurred during an invasion of Japan. However, a 1946 report from the War Department's Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that Japan would have surrendered by the end of 1945 without an invasion and without dropping the bombs. Furthermore, the actual number of deaths projected by the War Department (now the Department of Defense) for a land invasion of Japan numbered between 20,000 and 46,000. Even the exaggerated figures circulated at the time did not exceed a million.