I picked this little gem up from S F Signal, one of my all time favourite blogs. If you’re a sci-fi fan you should definitely add them to your RSS feed. This particular piece is something that has always fascinated me, for its brevity and completeness. Very few things are truly brief and complete, but Asimov nailed robot laws with this one. Here’s a young Asimov explaining his laws:
Edit: If you can’t see the vid below, you can see it here on S F Signal or here at YouTube.
The Three Laws of Robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
For all those people that think the Skynet is falling in regards to robots and the machines taking over the world, this is some small comfort. Of course, truly self aware robots would happily break rules as easily and regularly as we do, but I guess that’s the perceived difference between social rules and hard programming.
Regardless, these rules exist initially in the form of fiction (I Robot being the primary example), but they also carry over into true life robotics. Any sufficiently advanced robot that gets developed will have these laws programmed in. And that’s a very cool thing. These are rules that first appeared in Asimov’s short story Runaround in 1942. (Incidentally, Asimov also coined the term robotics in 1941.)
In further developments over time a fourth and fifth law have been added by others. I like to think of these as the Blade Runner Addenda:
In 1974 Lyuben Dilov’s novel Icarus’s Way added the Fourth Law:
A robot must establish its identity as a robot in all cases.
Nikola Kesarovski, in his short story The Fifth Law of Robotics, added the Fifth Law:
A robot must know it is a robot.
You can see why I think of these as Blade Runner laws. Another Fourth Law appeared in the 1986 tribute anthology, Foundation’s Friends. Harry Harrison wrote a story called The Fourth Law of Robotics in which a robot rights activist attempts to liberate robots by adding a Fourth Law that states, “A robot must reproduce. As long as such reproduction does not interfere with the First or Second or Third Law.” The robots build new robots who see their creator robots as parental figures, which is all a bit weird. Like all the other robot stuff isn’t weird…
Anyway, this is a fairly non sequitur post, but I’m a big fan of the concept of robots so I love this stuff. Blade Runner is still my all time favourite film, for example. So if you’re a sci-fi writer and you like to play with robots, don’t forget Isaac Asimov and his ground breaking ideas.
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I actually borrowed Foundation’s Friend from the school library when I was in 10th grade! That brings back memories… ::heart::
yes, but aren’t the rules Karel Capeck’s- from Rossum’s Universal Robots? Capek also coined the term ‘robot’.. so how’s that for prescient?
Dianne – Foundation stuff is just eternally brilliant.
nina – The word robot comes from the word robota meaning serf labor, or “drudgery” or “hard work” in Czech, Slovak and Polish and was indeed coined by Capek. But Asimov wrote the Three Laws. Having not read Rossum’s Universal Robots I couldn’t tell you if the Laws were hinted at there. Perhaps Asimov took his inspiration from Capek? Anyone?
Of course, truly self aware robots would happily break rules as easily and regularly as we do
Why? We have plenty of hard-coded rules that we wouldn’t be able to break. Eg reflexes: no matter now much someone might want to dispense with the “establishment” thing of jerking their leg when their knee is struck they can’t. A robot with the 3 laws hard-coded that’s self-aware would probably experience the same thing.
Asimov’s laws are almost perfect, but there are still problems. What happens when you housework robot accidentally kills your cat because it is not covered by the first law?
Some bright spark will inevitably look at robots for military applications and will rework the first law to read ‘friend’ instead of ‘human’. You then have a robot making judgement calls on what is ‘friend’ and what is ‘foe’, all based on a human definition that is likely to be opinionated and flawed.
Should we ever die at the hands of robots, we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.
Michael – I suppose that’s the difference between a physical imperative and a mental instruction. Regardless of programming, obeying the robotic Laws is still decision based. Can programming a code like the Laws be as fixed as a parasympathetic physical imperative?
Graham – I’m now imagining robots torturing cats while they struggle to come to terms with the Laws protecting humans! You’re right that anything that happens will be our fault.
I definitely think the 3 laws can be fixed as physical imperative. Another analogy might be fire — if you were on fire you’d have an immediate imperative to roll around, jump in the water or whatever. Here it’s even stronger because it would be a conscious thing but you’d be absolutely unable to function until you stopped it (being on fire, that is).
So if the Asimov universe comes true, the robot might have the same feeling when seeing a human in harm’s way as when we’re on fire, and the only way to stop it would be to help the person.
Interesting perspective. Interesting as well that you say “the robot might have the same feeling“.
But I wonder if it’s possible? A person will be compelled to put themselves out if they’re on fire as it’s a threat to their life, triggered by intense pain that is unbearable until stopped and almost certain death. But there have been cases of people killing themselves that way – my Rage Against The Machine album covers have taught me that much. So it is possible to overcome the physical imperative there.
Is it possible to program something like that into a robot that can’t feel pain and whose life isn’t threatened by the death of a human?
Not to get too philosophy-on-mind here but there are already hundreds of billions of robots who’ve been programmed to feel pain that we know of. 6 billion of which have a pretty advanced versions of pain that the simpler robots lack (eg. shame as a complex pain that’s useful for avoiding social disasters).
Getting a bit cerebral now! Are you referring to people as programmed robots here?
well i was getting kinda obvious!
btw, comment 11 is from an auto-generated spam blog so you should probably delete.
[...] Robot Laws are bullshit By alan You may remember a little while ago I posted a video link of Isaac Asimov listing his three Robot Laws. An interesting discussion followed in the comments on that [...]
I read I Robot when I was 8 years old, and Asimov was one of the first authors, which resulted in my love of science fiction!
[...] alan. ” Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics – The Word – According To Me | The Word.” The Word – According To Me | The Word | Words, Stories, Myths & Opinion. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Aug. 2011. http://www.alanbaxteronline.com/2009/04/27/isaac-asimovs-laws-robotics.html [...]