Which "Laws" Should Our Modern Robots Use?

Ok science fiction/robot story fans, the next three lines  should be instantly identifiable. 

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 the 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 laws.

If you said anything other that Dr. Asimov's three robot behavioral constraints.  Asimov used these"laws" as foils for his story plots concerning robot's behavior often with a conflict between a law and what the robot needs to accomplish.

The curious thing about these laws is that many people know of them and consider them real restrictions on anything vaguely robotic.  So the problem at hand is which laws can realistically be incorporated and which are beyond our tech. 

Case in point The robot controlled car.  Here is the instance that The New-Yorker 

• Your car is speeding along a bridge at fifty miles per hour when errant school bus carrying forty innocent children crosses its path. Should your car swerve, possibly risking the life of its owner (you), in order to save the children, or keep going, putting all forty kids at risk?

Chances are you have only a few thousandth of a second to make the complicated maneuver. 

Now add in all the robotic devices that the military uses.  I sounds almost impossible to implement and in the next  couple of decades the problem will most likely triple in complexity.

Here is the url to the New Yorker article.                        

30 Laws of Robotics - Whaaaaaaaaaaaa?!

We are all fairly familiar with Science fiction author Isaac Asimov's three laws controlling robotic behavior:

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 the orders given 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 Laws.

Well it would appear that those odd fellows over at Something Awful (who also state that "the internet makes you stupid") have appended the list with 27 more expanding the list 10 fold. Here is some excerpts:

• A robot may not obey orders given to it by any human being who is my worthless ex-wife...

• A robot may not roll down the window shout out the surprise endings of movies while driving past a theater line.

• A robot must stop visiting Isaac Asimov's bedroom at night and fabricating situations that would make it appear that the sleeping Asimov has less than total control of his urinary faculties.

• A robot must harm my ridiculous hooker ex-wife, whenever possible, because she does not count as a human being because she has no soul.

and so many more. What makes these even funnier is that the by-line is Isaac Asimov, however one suspects that the writer to be Something Awful's own David Thorpe. Still, that doesn't diminish the humor one iota.

Something Awful Laws via Boing Boing

Robot charged with attempted 1st law violation gets 10 to 20 years.

The machine-gun toting, grenade launching robot SWORDS is no longer roaming Iraqi batttlefields. 18 of these robots reported for duty in Iraq in early 2005. Now they have been pulled out of battlespace - for anywhere from ten to twenty years.

Apparently there was an incident at which, with impressive understatement, Army spokesman Kevin Fahey explained, "the gun started moving when it was not intended to move," the Army said. What he actually meant was that SWORDS had turned right around and pointed its sizable arsenal at its ostensible masters. Fortunately the robot was safely deactivated and removed from the field without firing its weapons.

While the Army investigation is pending, let's speculate from an Asimovian point of view what took place and what charges could be laid against SWORDS Robot for violating robotic law. One could blame the army's programmers, who attempted to produce intelligent robots with brains that could selectively violate the Three Laws of Robotics.

The army programmers scheme was to attempt to allow robotic violation of the first law of robotics through misapplication of the 2nd Law, resulting in implementation of lethal actions under a misapplied third Law. The triune Law of Robotics is as follows:

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.

The SWORDS experimental post-positronic brain designers, however, may have attempted to develop a robot brain whose ability to perform correlative judgments using the limited and rapidly shifting data of the active war environment, would allow it to selectively violate the all three Law while satisfying the robot's logic systems that adherence to the Three Laws was being maintained.

It didn't work, as the SWORDS handlers found out. "They essentially programmed a flaw into more one of the P-brain's sequential selective coordinate systems," one person guessed. "Unable to resolve the battlefield's behavioral dilemmas, conflicting potentials built up, followed by a surprise concatenating effect where SWORDS apparently resolved its problem of needing to injure or kill human beings to protect other human beings without harming human beings by destroying the implements of war. Reaching the logical conclusion that in battlespace 'people don't kill people; weapons do', the SWORDS positronic brain had opted to disable any weaponry within its battlespace, freeing the human beings from the use of these dangerous items and logically deducing that fisticuffs would be highly unlikely to be implemented as military tactics.

It was due to that very fortunate selectivity that SWORDS didn't mow down the more than two dozen observers and support personnel on the scene. Luckily for them, the Iraqi test field's parking area and helicopter pad were out of view behind a large storage bunker. Thus the SWORDS robot perceived only a gathering of human beings when it turned around to 'check its back' and not their hummers and choppers, which would have been clearly recognizable to SWORDS as weapons.

Back in the real world...The verdict is in: SWORDS is headed off to plowshare land. Chances are the robot won't enter live battlespace for anywhere from ten to twenty years, according to program manager Fahey.
Image source: gizmodo.com
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