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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Have you even read I Robot? You now, the book in which the laws of robotics lead the robots to institute a robot ruled dictatorship, taking away human freedoms because they reasoned by by controlling our lives completely they could protect us from ourselves? The whole point of Asimov's laws was that naively encoded moral rules can have horrific consequences.

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Exactly. It's surprising how Asimov's Laws became recognized in the popular culture as a well-thought-out solution to the morality issues of AIs, when their whole point was to be an example of how to not do things.

That was the movie version of I, Robot. In the book version, people handed control over to the Machines because they found that the Machines could plan economic and governmental matters better than people could. Also, in Asimov's literary canon, the robots ultimately destroy themselves on the reasoning that having them around was crippling humanity.

I Robot is a collection os short stories about a variety of themes, but the idea of the robots usurping human independence in order to protect them is there in "The Evitable Conflict", and in ".. That Thou Art Mindful Of Him" two robots explore the idea that the consequences of the laws are that they should take over the authority of humans. So it's definitely there, although Asimov never actually portrayed the revolution itself.

Asimov didn't portray any revolution because he was, in his day, a socialist. He simply assumed that clear-thinking human beings would deliberately employ the best planning instruments they had available for their governance, those being the robots.

I at least partially agree with him on this one! Mid-20th-century American "libertarianism" aside, working in government, and even political "freedom", is simply not the terminal goal of most real people! Yes, we want our Mind overlords (paging Ian Banks) to leave us our free choice in personally-important situations so we can have responsibilities and achievements, but when it comes to keeping the supermarkets stocked, the health clinics open, the data-centers buzzing, the budgets balanced, and the trains arriving on time, automate away!

It seems possible that when Asimov first conceived of the laws of robotics, he thought it would all work out very nicely and only realised the negative consequences later.

I've read quite a bit of Asimov, did you notice it's the same story over and over again?

I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.

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