Three Laws of Robotics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In science fiction, the Three Laws of Robotics are a set of three rules written by Isaac Asimov, which almost all positronic robots appearing in his fiction must obey. Introduced in his 1942 short story “Runaround”, although foreshadowed in a few earlier stories, the Laws state the following:
“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 any 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.”
Loopholes in the lawsIn The Naked Sun, Elijah Baley points out that the Laws had been deliberately misrepresented because robots could unknowingly break any of them. He restated the first law as “A robot may do nothing that, to its knowledge, will harm a human being; nor, through inaction, knowingly allow a human being to come to harm.” This change in wording makes it clear that robots can become the tools of murder, provided they are not aware of the nature of their tasks; for instance being ordered to add something to a person’s food, not knowing that it is poison. Furthermore, he points out that a clever criminal could divide a task among multiple robots, so that no one robot could even recognize that its actions would lead to harming a human being. (The Naked Sun complicates the issue by portraying a decentralized, planetwide communication network among Solaria’s millions of robots, meaning that the criminal mastermind could be located anywhere on the planet.)
Baley furthermore proposes that the Solarians may one day use robots for military purposes. If a spacecraft were built with a positronic brain, and carried neither humans nor even the life-support systems to sustain them, the ship’s robotic intelligence would naturally assume that all other spacecraft were robotic beings. Such a ship could operate more responsively and flexibly than one crewed by humans, and it could be armed more heavily, its robotic brain equipped to slaughter humans of whose existence it is totally ignorant. This possibility is referenced in Foundation and Earth, where, indeed, it is discovered that the Solarians possess a strong police force of unspecified size that has been programmed to identify only the Solarian race as human (and only mature specimens at that).
