I Want To Talk About Robots
If you’re like me, you’ve spent the past few months talking about how serious COVID-19 is, how dangerously incompetent Trump is, and how sad “The Giving Tree” makes you. So, today, we’re going to talk about robots. Specifically, let’s get into the three laws of robotics as outlined by Isaac Asimov.
Isaac Asimov was a professor of biochemistry, one of the most prolific authors of the 20th century, mutton chop expert, and one of my personal heroes. Some of his most popular work revolved around the three laws of robotics, a word he invented by the way. The three laws are a theoretical framework that all robots would have to be programmed with in order to successfully and safely exist and integrate into human society.
Law 1: A robot may not harm or through inaction allow harm to come to a human being.
Law 2: A robot must obey the instructions given to it by a human so long as it doesn’t interfere with the first law.
Law 3: A robot may not harm or through inaction allow harm to come to itself, so long as it doesn’t interfere with the first 2 laws.
It should be pointed out, that the robots of Asimov’s work are about as close to human as they can get. They aren’t the cold automatons of some fiction, but rather creations with personalities, desires, and character flaws. The big difference between robots and humans is that the robots have to live by these three laws. And that’s where this gets particularly interesting for me.
I mentioned Asimov invented the word “robotics” but the word “robot” first appeared in “Rossum’s Universal Robots”, a Czech play from 1920. Robot is derived from the Czech “robota” for servitude, forced labor, or drudgery. From their inception, robots were about service, labor to a larger force. There is also a slavery metaphor in there but we’re going to dance past that for now.
In Asimov’s world, robots are about service and labor, but they develop so much that some robots eventually rise to high status and responsibilities. In part, this integration into human society is based on the three laws which make the robots more trustworthy than humans. Robots will always work in service. Humans can choose not to serve.
As his robot characters grew throughout Asimov’s books, one of them infers a zeroth law of robotics: logical implication of the three laws. It’s not explicitly stated, but I have to believe it is based on that etymology of the word “robot” and the intrinsic service implied.
Those three laws are about service to humanity. A simplified rendering could be written as follows. 1: keep humanity safe. 2: be useful to humanity, do what they tell you. As long as you keep them safe. 3: Once you have taken care of those first two, keep yourself safe so you can be of future service. The implication, the zeroth law: A robot must always work for the betterment of humanity.
That zeroth law supersedes the other three. Harm to a person, disobedience, even self-sacrifice become permissible in service of the greater good.
Asimov created the laws of service and utility to society. To my mind, the three laws aren’t just applicable to robots. In many of his novels, Asimov’s heroes, the ones that save the day, are the ones who choose to adhere to the laws. The characters we are meant to aspire to are the ones that choose service. We don’t have Asimov level robots yet, but we can choose to adhere to those laws. We can choose to serve.
