The Caves of Steel

Positronic robots, arriving on Earth over the objections of almost everyone who lives there.

Work a classified job in a sealed City, at a rating that determines where you eat, whether you get a seat on the expressway and how much water you are allotted. Elijah Baley is a C-5. Losing the rating means declassification, and the Medievalist riots are about robots taking the jobs that hold the ratings up.

Obsolescence — The work goes, and standing goes with it.

Usually read as a detective novel, and it is one. It is also the earliest work in the catalogue to treat automation as a labour-relations problem with an actual political constituency behind it.