Three Laws of Robotics stated explicitly. Several years later Asimov's friend Randall Garrett attributed the Laws to a symbiotic partnership between the two men – a suggestion that Asimov adopted enthusiastically. According to his autobiographical writings, Asimov included the First Law's "inaction" clause because of Arthur Hugh Clough's poem "The Latest Decalogue" (), which includes the satirical lines "Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive / officiously to keep alive". Although Asimov pins the creation of the Three Laws on one particular date, their appearance in his literature happened over a period. He wrote two robot stories with no explicit mention of the
Three Laws of Robotics and Empire" and the short stories "Evidence" and "The Tercentenary Incident" describe robots crafted to fool people into believing that the robots are human. On the other hand, "The Bicentennial Man" and "—That Thou Art Mindful of Him" explore how the robots may change their interpretation of the Laws as they grow more sophisticated. Gwendoline Butler writes in "A Coffin for the Canary" "Perhaps we are robots. Robots acting out the last Law of Robotics... To tend towards the human." In "The Robots of Dawn", Elijah Baley points out that the use of humaniform robots as the first wave of