It's also kind of ironic that the same piece of literature that introduced the concept of the robot also introduced the perennial concept of the coming robot rebellion.
As literary devices, robots don't have much to do besides rebel. If they just did what we told them to do, there wouldn't be much story to tell. (Note that that's part of why _I, Robot_ was so mind blowing - a lot of it was about things going wrong when the robots did exactly what we told them.)
Of course, we now know that Marx's inflexible theories were wrong, and proletarian revolution is by no means inevitable. We are, however, still stuck with a half-baked idea of the inevitable robot revolution, which tinges the whole field of robotics research, at least as seen from the outside, with a subconscious bitterness of fear.
Lots of interesting robot stories without "doing just what we told them to do"