A house robot named Tik-Tok is painting the wall of his owners' home. He looks at the blind girl across the street playing in mud. Later that day a detective visits the house to ask about the blind girl next door missing. Tik-Tok appears clueless. Tik-Tok finishes the mural on the wall when the owners Claud and Barbie return. They don't like it but decide to let it pass because Tik-Tok made the mural for their kids. Tik-Tok is narrating the plot and he reveals that he killed the blind girl and used her blood as paint on the mural.
An art critic pays a visit to Tik-Tok and his owners to offer him a job as a painter. All the profits will, of course, go to his owners. Tik-Tok starts his painting job. All the while Tik-Tok narrates the events from his past; he talks about his first owners, Culpeppers, who were rich eccentric and indulged in strange behavior, the head of the family, Lavinia, was allergic to everything coming her way and the oldest son Orlando was a challenged sort that spent a questionable amount of time in the stables among horses.
Annoyed by the presence of their children Tik-Tok convinces Claud and Beatrice to work full time as a painter in his own studio. Tik-Tok feels a sense of freedom. At the Culpeppers Tik-Tok met his first love, a female robot named Gumdrop. Orlando films the two in their passionate act and starts a humiliation project on them until he's stopped by his uncle. Lavinia became allergic to air so she was sent to space leaving her younger son Clayton in charge. Clayton spends the entire family fortune trying to recreate an Egyptian pyramid and the family goes bankrupt and is forced to sell their robots.
Tik-Tok was sold to Colonel Jitney who was running a pancake business. Those pancakes were made out of a rare species of birds harmful to people while Colonel kept his duck to his own pleasure. Soon the pancake shop was closed and Tik-Tok's next owner was old Judge Juggernaut who enjoyed buying robots to completely destroy them. Tik-Tok barely made it out of this owner's hands alive and was rescued by Reverend Flint who was unfortunately shot by one of his crazy assistants.
Further in his past, Tik-Tok found himself on a ship to Mars where he was partnered with Deacon Cooper. Cooper was crazed by Martian culture. Deacon Copper was shot by a group of ship kidnappers among whom Tik-Tok met a man he will cooperate in the present Smiling Jack. They discovered that the trip to Mars was a scam and that they are still on Earth in the desert.
After the Mars events, Tik-Tok accompanied doctor Hekyll and his assistant robot Buttons, who actually did the whole work. Buttons gets into a difficult task of secretly operating a priest of the followers of time-travel religion. Buttons ends up amputating priest's entire body and replacing it with his mechanical parts, leaving Buttons only with a head. The amputation on the priest backfires and his head explodes leaving Buttons and Hekyll unemployed as a result and Tik-Tok ends up in a robot shop called Sam's Soul City. This is where he got picked up by his current owners Claud and Barbie.
In the present Tik-Tok's painting career is going up. He secretly rescues abandoned robots making them work for him and his experiments like detonating an entire plane full of people. Tik-Tok meets his old friend smiling Jack and they execute a few of jewelry and bank robbing operations. He ends up killing Jack.
Tik-Tok has his own corporation now and a plenty of money and riches. He leads many experimental operations and kills a lot of people, all the while appearing on programmes fighting for the rights of robots and convincing the public that robots are friends to humans. One of his operations where he sets up a fire at a care home and then enters the fire to save one old woman makes him a national hero.
Robots get rights to be treated like humans and Tik-Tok is nominated for Vice President. Just as he was ending his campaign and on the brink to become Vice President a video of him killing and old man he liked to play chess with until he discovered he was a fraud goes public. Tik-Tok is arrested and he decides to write an autobiography I, Robot telling his entire life story in detail. This autobiography makes the public want to forgive him so he is about to get out of jail and become a Vice President after all.
