Three Laws of Robotics


The Three Laws of Robotics are a set of rules devised by science fiction author Isaac Asimov, which were to be followed by robots in several of his stories. The rules were introduced in his 1942 short story "Runaround", although similar restrictions had been implied in earlier stories.

The Laws

The Three Laws, presented to be from the fictional "Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D.", are:
  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 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.

    Use in fiction

The Three Laws form an organizing principle and unifying theme for Asimov's robot-based fiction, appearing in his Robot series, the stories linked to it, and in his Lucky Starr series of young-adult fiction. The Laws are incorporated into almost all of the positronic robots appearing in his fiction, and cannot be bypassed, being intended as a safety feature. A number of Asimov's robot-focused stories involve robots behaving in unusual and counter-intuitive ways as an unintended consequence of how the robot applies the Three Laws to the situation in which it finds itself.
Other authors working in Asimov's fictional universe have adopted them and references appear throughout science fiction as well as in other genres.
The original laws have been altered and elaborated on by Asimov and other authors. Asimov himself made slight modifications to the first three in subsequent works to further develop how robots would interact with humans and each other. In later fiction where robots had taken responsibility for government of whole planets and human civilizations, Asimov also added a fourth, or zeroth law, to precede the others.
The Three Laws have also influenced thought on the ethics of artificial intelligence.

History

In The Rest of the Robots, published in 1964, Isaac Asimov noted that when he began writing in 1940 he felt that "one of the stock plots of science fiction was ... robots were created and destroyed their creator. Knowledge has its dangers, yes, but is the response to be a retreat from knowledge? Or is knowledge to be used as itself a barrier to the dangers it brings?" He decided that in his stories a robot would not "turn stupidly on his creator for no purpose but to demonstrate, for one more weary time, the crime and punishment of Faust."
On May 3, 1939, Asimov attended a meeting of the Queens Science Fiction Society where he met Earl and Otto Binder who had recently published a short story "I, Robot" featuring a sympathetic robot named Adam Link who was misunderstood and motivated by love and honor. Asimov admired the story. Three days later Asimov began writing "my own story of a sympathetic and noble robot", his 14th story. Thirteen days later he took "Robbie" to John W. Campbell the editor of Astounding Science-Fiction. Campbell rejected it, claiming that it bore too strong a resemblance to Lester del Rey's "Helen O'Loy", published in December 1938—the story of a robot that is so much like a person that she falls in love with her creator and becomes his ideal wife. Frederik Pohl published the story under the title “Strange Playfellow” in Super Science Stories September 1940.
Asimov attributes the Three Laws to John W. Campbell, from a conversation that took place on 23 December 1940. Campbell claimed that Asimov had the Three Laws already in his mind and that they simply needed to be stated explicitly. Several years later Asimov's friend Randall Garrett attributed the Laws to a symbiotic partnership between the two men—a suggestion that Asimov adopted enthusiastically. According to his autobiographical writings, Asimov included the First Law's "inaction" clause because of Arthur Hugh Clough's poem "The Latest Decalogue", which includes the satirical lines "Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive / officiously to keep alive".
Although Asimov pins the creation of the Three Laws on one particular date, their appearance in his literature happened over a period. He wrote two robot stories with no explicit mention of the Laws, "Robbie" and "Reason". He assumed, however, that robots would have certain inherent safeguards. "Liar!", his third robot story, makes the first mention of the First Law but not the other two. All three laws finally appeared together in "Runaround". When these stories and several others were compiled in the anthology I, Robot, "Reason" and "Robbie" were updated to acknowledge all the Three Laws, though the material Asimov added to "Reason" is not entirely consistent with the Three Laws as he described them elsewhere. In particular the idea of a robot protecting human lives when it does not believe those humans truly exist is at odds with Elijah Baley's reasoning, as described [|below].
During the 1950s Asimov wrote a series of science fiction novels expressly intended for young-adult audiences. Originally his publisher expected that the novels could be adapted into a long-running television series, something like The Lone Ranger had been for radio. Fearing that his stories would be adapted into the "uniformly awful" programming he saw flooding the television channels Asimov decided to publish the Lucky Starr books under the pseudonym "Paul French". When plans for the television series fell through, Asimov decided to abandon the pretence; he brought the Three Laws into Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter, noting that this "was a dead giveaway to Paul French's identity for even the most casual reader".
In his short story "Evidence" Asimov lets his recurring character Dr. Susan Calvin expound a moral basis behind the Three Laws. Calvin points out that human beings are typically expected to refrain from harming other human beings and this is equivalent to a robot's First Law. Likewise, according to Calvin, society expects individuals to obey instructions from recognized authorities such as doctors, teachers and so forth which equals the Second Law of Robotics. Finally humans are typically expected to avoid harming themselves which is the Third Law for a robot.
The plot of "Evidence" revolves around the question of telling a human being apart from a robot constructed to appear human. Calvin reasons that if such an individual obeys the Three Laws he may be a robot or simply "a very good man". Another character then asks Calvin if robots are different from human beings after all. She replies, "Worlds different. Robots are essentially decent."
Asimov later wrote that he should not be praised for creating the Laws, because they are "obvious from the start, and everyone is aware of them subliminally. The Laws just never happened to be put into brief sentences until I managed to do the job. The Laws apply, as a matter of course, to every tool that human beings use", and "analogues of the Laws are implicit in the design of almost all tools, robotic or not":
  1. Law 1: A tool must not be unsafe to use. Hammers have handles and screwdrivers have hilts to help increase grip. It is of course possible for a person to injure himself with one of these tools, but that injury would only be due to his incompetence, not the design of the tool.
  2. Law 2: A tool must perform its function efficiently unless this would harm the user. This is the entire reason ground-fault circuit interrupters exist. Any running tool will have its power cut if a circuit senses that some current is not returning to the neutral wire, and hence might be flowing through the user. The safety of the user is paramount.
  3. Law 3: A tool must remain intact during its use unless its destruction is required for its use or for safety. For example, Dremel disks are designed to be as tough as possible without breaking unless the job requires it to be spent. Furthermore, they are designed to break at a point before the shrapnel velocity could seriously injure someone.
Asimov believed that, ideally, humans would also follow the Laws:
Asimov stated in a 1986 interview on the Manhattan public access show Conversations with Harold Hudson Channer with guest co-host Marilyn vos Savant, "It's a little humbling to think that, what is most likely to survive of everything I've said... After all, I've published now... I've published now at least 20 million words. I'll have to figure it out, maybe even more. But of all those millions of words that I've published, I am convinced that 100 years from now only 60 of them will survive. The 60 that make up the Three Laws of Robotics."

Alterations

By Asimov

Asimov's stories test his Three Laws in a wide variety of circumstances leading to proposals and rejection of modifications. Science fiction scholar James Gunn writes in 1982, "The Asimov robot stories as a whole may respond best to an analysis on this basis: the ambiguity in the Three Laws and the ways in which Asimov played twenty-nine variations upon a theme". While the original set of Laws provided inspirations for multiple stories, Asimov introduced modified versions from time to time.

First Law modified

In "Little Lost Robot" several NS-2, or "Nestor", robots are created with only part of the First Law. It reads:
This modification is motivated by a practical difficulty as robots have to work alongside human beings who are exposed to low doses of radiation. Because their positronic brains are highly sensitive to gamma rays the robots are rendered inoperable by doses reasonably safe for humans. The robots are being destroyed attempting to rescue the humans who are in no actual danger but "might forget to leave" the irradiated area within the exposure time limit. Removing the First Law's "inaction" clause solves this problem but creates the possibility of an even greater one: a robot could initiate an action that would harm a human, knowing that it was capable of preventing the harm and then decide not to do so.
Gaia is a planet with collective intelligence in the Foundation series which adopts a law similar to the First Law, and the Zeroth Law, as its philosophy: