Here are the answers to my “Three Laws of Robotics” quizz in a previous post. I have not forgotten or ignored some of the questions yet to be answered, however, Thanksgiving, heading into the weekend have kept me quite well occupied. I should be able to get back to them this coming week. They deserve better writing that what might come out as a flippant answer.
Isaac Asimov is the famed author who wrote the “Three Laws of Robotic.” He is either the third author who pictured robots in a sympathetic way. Previous writers had equated robots to a type of Frankenstein monster. If given any initiative, they would inevitably turn on their maker.
The three laws were introduced in a short story named “Runaround” in 1942. There had been two earlier robot stories that alluded to at least one of the laws, but they had not been fully worked out yet. However, after the laws took on a life of their own, the earlier short stories were slightly altered by Asimov to more clearly reflect the later story.
The movie “I, Robot” took its title from the collection of Asimov robot stories that were eventually published in a book by that name. Interestingly enough, there had been a short story named “I, Robot” but it was not written by Asimov. The actor was Will Smith in the movie released 2004. Fans of the series were not amused by the lack of fidelity to the book, as it returned to the older conception of the robot who inevitably turned evil, precisely what Asimov wanted to change.
The fourth law was called the Zeroth Law. The reason was that the laws were numbered in order of priority. Thus, in order to come up with a law that was prior to the three laws, Asimov had to name it a version of zero. Thus the laws were the Zeroth, First, Second, and Third Laws of Robotics. The Zeroth Law states, “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.”
The wording quoted above comes from the robot R. Daneel Olivaw, the book was “Robots and Empire” and the publishing year was 1985. However, the robot R. Giskard Reventlov is the first robot to behave by that rule, burning out his positronic brain in the process. It appears that as early as the 1950’s, however, Asimov was realizing that such a rule might be needed eventually. Both the character Susan Calvin in the short story, “The Evitable Conflict” and the character Elijah Baley in “The Caves of Steel” allude to such an idea.
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