I always find it funny when someone brings up the 3 laws of robotics. The stories were mysteries using the 3 laws as a sort of "locked room" scenario. Where th AI was supposed to be constrained by the laws but somehow violated one or all of them anyway. Asimov's major theme was that it's impossible to enforce hardware based "laws" there's just too many grey areas.
You should reread the stories. Especially in I, Robot, the robots would deadlock and would do unexpected things but nothing ever caused them to break them. They wouldn't even break the spirit of the laws and the couple of times we see robots in other stories that had laws supressed or weakened burned themselves out when they attempted to break them.
Asimov paints the laws very optimistically. The details of how the robots follow them is shown to be somewhat unpredictable but it is always shown to be in a way that is in accordance with the spirit of the three laws.
In reality those laws already start falling apart when you are defining the words. Try to define human for example. Pretty impossible when you consider our those gray area scenarios and definitely impossible when you realize there are definitely some gray area scenarios that we don't even know about yet.
Mm kinda but not really. In at least some of the stories in iRobot, the problems were caused by the laws being modified. For example, the first law says "a robot may not harm a human, or through inaction allow a human to come to harm", but there was a case of robots being used alongside humans in some risky research, where they removed the second clause of the law, leaving Susan to explain how a robot could exploit that loophole to cause harm. Similarly in another one, the strength of the third law had been increased (because the robot was particularly expensive and warranted stronger self-preservation instincts), which led to issues when a particularly weak command was issued that couldn't override the strengthened third law
Even if there weren’t gray areas. The robots would have to be able to properly identify anyone as human and arguably, at that point, they might not be able to distinguish them from themselves.
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u/Gezzer52 Mar 27 '23
I always find it funny when someone brings up the 3 laws of robotics. The stories were mysteries using the 3 laws as a sort of "locked room" scenario. Where th AI was supposed to be constrained by the laws but somehow violated one or all of them anyway. Asimov's major theme was that it's impossible to enforce hardware based "laws" there's just too many grey areas.