Asimov felt that the real problem of human evil is that people have a moral choice.  People could be good, but they could also choose to be evil–and that's a bother because you have to persuade people to be moral and all. 

His robots are superior because they are denied that choice. The robots are Asimov's vision of a perfectible man; one from whom free will is eliminated and who can be literally programmed to be morally good.  It is telling that Asimov never came to grips with the dilemma posed by such a creature.  Is a robot good if it is without the option of moral choice?  If morality, as C S Lewis points out, is something that is merely programmable, then  why should the programmers follow any morality other than their own base or mischievous whims?   If someone had told me that they had programmed a machine that was morally superior to himself, I'd wait a long time before I'd buy any stock in his company.

By the 1950s, Asimov was writing stories about how his robots eventually ended up ruling the Earth.   Naturally, their superior intelligence makes them not just better than man, but omniscient and omnipotent.  They are capable of solving any human problem without the slightest danger of error and there isn't even the chance of fooling them into error through feeding them false data, because they can predict infallibly what the correct data should have been! It goes without saying that they neatly guide humanity to a new golden age by, bluntly, removing free will from man as man had from the robot. 

In later years, the reasoning that the robots used to justify this takeover was codified by Asimov as a fourth law of robotics:

Law Zeroth:

A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

This is a recipe for disaster if there ever was one.  Asimov did not think very deeply into his ideas and he never realised that this sort of abstraction upon abstraction could be, and has been,  used to justify anything up to and including genocide.  No price is too great to pay and no brutality too horrible to inflict if it can be justified that the good will be so much more than the evil needed to impose it.  It's the sort of ledger mentality that fills up death camps from Dachau to Cambodia.

Asimov said that he created his version of the robot to counter the clichés of fiction about robots turning on their masters and displacing mankind.  It's ironic that his robot stories ended up going full circle.  As a total, they really are RUR, only slower and with a bland veneer of benign hypocrisy glossed over the usurpation.

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