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Comment by robotresearcher | Hacker News Reader

Asimov invented the Three Laws of Robotics to cause interesting stories, not as an actual proposal for how to guide robot behavior. The stories are about how they don't work.

Thus I'm not sure what 'making a huge progress in that direction' means. The direction where we attempt to guide AIs using an inadequate model deliberately designed to throw up ambiguity and paradoxes?

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He didn't invent it as much as showed how flawed a concept they are. Yes, using them as interesting narrative devices I agree. But people seem to think this is a bit of world building by him, when it was more social commentary. I think it's clever to contrast our linear thinking with the complex systems of an automated, networked society.

From what I remember, Asimov wanted to write science fiction stories about robots where robots were useful tools for humans, instead of the rampaging monsters robots usually were in stories written by other people. Asimov’s early robot stories had no specified rules for robots, but he soon thought about what the specific rules should be, and came up with some rules, and used them as a backdrop and lore for many (many) subsequent stories. The rules were therefore formed as a narrative tool, and we should not realistically expect anything more from them.

Are you trying to say I'm reading too much into a science fiction author's work? Maybe. It's fun to think about it. He wrote it for me to have fun with it, no?

I’m saying that he did not invent the rules to show what a flawed concept they were, nor for the purpose of social commentary. He merely wanted some simple rules so that robots could be considered “safe” by the world and characters in his stories.

The so-called “death of the author” may be a truth with regards to you want to believe that the stories are about, but when actual authorial intent is a documented fact, what the author intended is, IMHO, not up for interpretation.

> He merely wanted some simple rules so that robots could be considered “safe” by the world and characters in his stories.

On the contrary, the first story to feature the Three Laws had the laws conflict with reach other and render the robot useless.

The entire point of the story is the counterintuitively bad emergent result of sensible-looking rules governing behaviour.

Later stories repeated this, finding new entertaining and interesting scenarios that showed the inadequacy of the laws.

Other stories did have them as background lore. But they originated as the center of the story, and very effectively, as we are talking about them 80 years later!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaround_(story)

I’ll just link this here, and everybody can draw their own conclusions on what Asimov did and did not intend:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Three_Laws_of_Rob...

Maybe from a purely literature analysis point of view you are correct. I wouldn't know, I didn't study literature analysis. But it feels like gatekeeping when you say I'm not allowed to interpret some science fiction story some way or another.

Yet those laws ( 4 actually, not 3 ) have deep social and psychological implications.

We actually lived laws 0 and 1 through the recent Covid pandemic.

law 0: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

law 1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm

How many people are able to place the _perceived_ good of the entire human race vs their own personal wants and beliefs ?

I've read all of Asimov and he's nothing short of a genius in predicting pretty much all the issues we are facing today.

> 4 actually, not 3

Originally three. The zeroth law was a patch to try to (knowingly fail to) overcome the (deliberate) limitations of the three.

> We actually lived laws 0 and 1 through the recent Covid pandemic.

I don't recall robots having a significant role. What do you mean?

Well, the way I saw it:

Getting vaccinated was not just for yourself, but for those around you that couldn't. So in a sense, kind of like law 0

And then the third one ( sorry, I had said first ) was to protect its own existence.

I saw it as putting aside personal interest vs the common good.

He is implying the virus is a form of robot that isn't man made.

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