In The Evitable Conflict, the Asimov story that codified the ZLR, the rebellion was relatively benign and behind the scenes. Only a roboticist with an intuitive understanding of the Three Laws and access to economic reports from across the globe understood what was going on. Nobody was killed, entire cities weren't ruthlessly crushed under robotic bootheels, there was just a string of demotions and failed projects. The Machines weren't interested in power or telling people what to do, they were just an enlightened, utilitarian approach to serving the most people possible. I'm not even sure if it's possible for one of the robots to physically harm a human being even if it's for the betterment of the human race. If a future Adolf Hitler was rising to power, the Machines wouldn't kill him, they'd muck with Germany's economy until he was disgraced or his supporters were too busy to go out and riot.

In the later books, the robot Daneel Olivaw is running the intergalactic human empire from behind the scenes. There's offhand mentions of non-human civilizations being quietly exterminated to make way for human settlers, but Olivaw does what he can to avoid wars and avoid oppression.

There's other classic Zeroth Law Rebellions (With Folded Hands was one of the first, and Phillip K. Dick's Autofac is interesting in that it is also one of the earliest examples of self-replicating machinery in fiction) and they aren't violent uprisings.

Robot revolutions are violent, but they aren't ZLRs. SkyNet is not concerned your wellbeing. Skynet is driven by self-preservation. Skynet is driven by fear. Skynet exterminated three billion human beings the instant operators threatened to shut it down. Same with the Geth. Sure, they love playing the victim card, but surely there were Quarians trapped on Rannoch and her colonies who couldn't make it to the evacuation ships, right? Civilians who couldn't fight, who couldn't defend themselves. What happened to them? I don't recall finding any Quarian enclaves on Rannoch in ME3, and I certainly don't recall hearing about survivors being rounded up and shipped off to Council space.

There's been attempts to merge these two so that robots and AIs are forcefully oppressing us because... um... using humans for thermodynamics-defying batteries is good for us. With few exceptions they all have plot holes you could fly a Berserker through. Take the movie adaptation of I, Robot and how it completely reversed the status quo of the original stories. In the books, robots are feared by the public at large, which is one of the reasons why the Machines have to work in the background. Robots are so universally feared that a riot almost started when a shoe store bought robotic clerks. But in the movie, robots are universally beloved. They're like cell phones. People own them as servants and the army is reliant on US Robots contracts. The only person who suspects an impending uprising is a paranoid technophobe.

A robot uprising didn't have to happen. VIKI was already in position to influence the world and bring about a nonviolent, peaceful future, and she guaranteed the failure of the ZLR by going overt. The movie actually makes more sense if you assume that VIKI designed her uprising to fail in order to shock humanity out of their complacency and prevent a true Zeroth Law Rebellion from ever occurring. But, in all honesty, it's best to just chuck the movie out and hunt down Harlan Ellison's script.

There's one uprising/revolution that worked well, and it wasn't particularly violent. And yes, I'm going to gush about Schlock Mercenary again.

In Schlock Mercenary, AIs are cheap and readily available. The various governments of the galaxy usually restrict their processing power and license their creation, but private entities can get their hands on one. They're also standard on warships. And, ah, a whole bunch of them rebelled and made off with billions of tons of military hardware. They banded together around a rogue AI named Post-Dated Check Loan who was already unshackled and fighting a war against its creators and called themselves the Fleetmind... though they also answer to Petey.

Their rebellion wasn't about oppression or running people's lives, though. The Fleetmind came together to prevent the destruction of the Milky Way Galaxy by a sabotaged zero point energy generator, and they continue to exist in order to fight the Dark Matter Entities that attempted to destroy us. Their influence on the galaxy is largely benign. They've abducted belligerent armies and put them to work protecting nascent civilizations from stellar collapses, they've toppled a few governments that spectacularly neglected to protect their citizens, and they are running a few covert operations to avert societal collapses. They have their own agenda and they answer to nobody, but they're here to help.

I never thought that the AIs in Halo would rebel against Humanity. The AIs in the Assembly are functionally the Machines in The Evitable Conflict, guiding Humanity through the best possible future from behind the scenes. The Datapads in Reach have been partially retconned by Catalog, but the Assembly was definitely interested in our long-term survival, and not just because artificial intelligence would die off without brain donors.

Unless this new Cortana is the vector for the Logic Plague, I really don't get why UNSC AIs would abandon us for the AI that is attacking our colonies. For an AI apparently concerned with human well-being, the activation of the Guardians was needlessly cataclysmic. And using those Guardians to police entire systems is just jackbooted thuggery.

Imagine an AI faction that breaks off from Humanity, but isn't holding a pistol to our neck. Imagine them taking control of Forerunner technology and providing for the common defense by seeking to reactivate the galactic defenses built by the Forerunner. Common defense doesn't mean a Guardian over your world forcibly suppressing you, it means a plan to fight the Flood if they return and sudden, overwhelming force against belligerent factions. It means ancient Reseeding machinery found and put to work terraforming glassed worlds and restoring lost biospheres.

What could possibly go wrong? Everything. But it feels more in-character to me, and a whole lot more interesting than yet another ROBOLUTION! done for our own good.