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 Law.
Don't always work in all scenarios, was the takeaway.
There's a metric ton of salt to be taken with the mental concepts and possible interpretations of such "laws".
Largely, they do work in the stories, despite the inherent ambiguity.
> There does not exist a set of rules that make a completely safe and useful robot.
That was not demonstrated. We have safe and useful robots, for some values of 'safe' and 'useful', today. Again, most of the robots in the stories are not thrown (or planned to be thrown) in the metaphorical trash heap.
It’s a bit hard to write a story about the impacts of robots in society without a society with robots. There is also an entire series based around a world where the robots tried to rise up against humans.
> That was not demonstrated.
No, that was my summary of his point. It is not perfect, but I think it’s accurate enough. I can assure you, that none of today’s robots are completely safe. They will be just as happy to move wherever you tell them regardless of what is in the way. When I said “completely safe” I mean it in the way that the three laws are written, incapable of harm. I am not arguing that robots are not useful, but his point was about a perfect safety system. It doesn’t exist.
Was it? I haven't read the short stories in some times, but I remember the case in which they don't work always being treated like an extremely rare, newsworthy exception.
1. Do not humanize the Ai
2. Do not blindly trust output from the Ai
3. Humans are to remain ultimately responsible and accountable for actions of the Ai
adapted / paraphrased from
I've been working on an Ai mini-zine series to help rationalize the conversation in our dysfunctional social/news media ecosystem. I include these rules on the back cover.
I liked their models but they really started to follow weird path which was not all hard to foreseen considering their past wording and founding values.
OpenAI seems more relaxed at least and rational instead of cultish.
Lovely competition.
Don't anthropomorphize computers - they hate that.
The trolley problem with this would be an Asimov story (it's pretty close already). Pulling the lever injures a human, not pulling the lever allows a human being to come to harm via inaction. The positronic robot probably ends up stuck trying to pull and not pull the lever at the same time.
C3PO, torture that puppy for my entertainment is a perfectly valid request under this framework. They work OK in the stories because Asimov set them up that way, both as sort of just-so stories and (perhaps) to explore socially created barriers in contemporary society.
But they don't work in contexts where people deliberately exploit holes in the logic or definition. Literally yesterday, the news provided us with an example of how some people will absolutely abuse robots in pursuit of being awful: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ck9dzj40nzj5o
I mean, you don't have to be a famed sci-fi writer to understand that this is a great setup for logical contradictions lol
The essence of these laws are much more interesting than these laws themselves. I imagine, in reality, the "best" robot policy would be one where it is effectively just "maximize utility" and that's it. Obviously, naively, that's no good (re: paperclip problem), but some sensible formulation of robotics laws would almost always need to be in the form of a maximization/minimization problem (or perhaps a min-max problem).