TED EGE COLLEGE / 8-A
Robots, Ethics and
Asimov’s I, Robot
Nisan GÜNGEN
The three rules of robots and robot production
rules in the future World of our planet gives
Asimov’s readers a new and safe perspective
of future world. But we still find ourselves in an
atmosphere that nothing is certain and safe about
artificial intelligence.
Let me remind you the rules:
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 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.
I think they are so important. Because if we assume
that we are all familiar with the three laws we can
hardly understand what they mean.
In her book ‘Evidence’ Susan CALVIN says ‘The
three rules of robotics are the essential guiding
principles of many of the world’s ethical systems.
With these rules we assure that robots are not
harmful but good for all people in the World.
But there’s something about the Laws that almost
everyone gets wrong: people think of the Three
laws as software that’s just programmed in to the
robot’s brain—you could program the laws and
have a good robot or not program the laws and
have an evil robot. But check out when Calvin and
Peter Bogert discuss the issue in “Little Lost Robot”:
if you modify the Three laws, you would be left
with “complete instability, with no nonimaginary
solutions to the artificial minds of robots. The Laws
are not just programs; they’re a necessary part of
how you build an artificial brain. “A positronic brain
cannot be constructed without” the laws.
So, if you leave the laws out, you don’t get an evil
and intelligent robot, but rather a crazy robot, or
just a pile of metal. So, in Asimov’s robot stories,
the Three Laws are not just a guarantee that
the robots are good. They seem to indicate that
there is some connection between goodness and
stability/sanity—or even between goodness and
intelligence. That is, it’s impossible to be truly
intelligent unless you’re truly good.