Gregory's Server@jwildeboer I’ve always held those four laws as Holy Truths, mostly because I’ve never heard them challenged.
Until today.
I’d love to learn alternative perspectives on why they may be inadequate or contradictory.
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7 comments
 @ankitpati It took me many years to understand that simple truth. But once I did and read the books again, it was so obvious and helped me understand the deeper meaning. Reality is more complex and contradictory than simple rules suggest.  @jwildeboer The way I remember it, it’s always because *someone* (not robots, but actual humans) thinks they’re smarter than the laws and/or the laws don’t apply to them and/or they can helpfully reorder the laws. Basically in-universe techbros. If anything, the tales show exactly why we need iron-fisted regulatory frameworks backed by severe personal penalties (no, companies are not persons) to enforce these laws. @ankitpati you really should read the books again, especially from the perspective of Susan Calvin, the robopsychologist. Her struggles with the 3 laws and how she tried to reason them makes a lot more sense when viewed from the perspective of failure. It took me some time to understand.  @jwildeboer @ankitpati by the time i finished reading I, Robot it felt less like speculative fiction about artificial intelligence and more a collection of clever moral logical conundrums told through a specific arbitrary setting that happened to involve artificial intelligences
 @ankitpati @jwildeboer Broot Force is the obvious short story. Roderick also touches on it (Tiktok is perhaps the more famous one but isn't really about the logic of the 3 laws so much as the question of their morality themselves and robots as slave labour)  @ankitpati @jwildeboer I've never read any Asimov, but Computerphile did a video on the laws of robotics that I thought explained the problems pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PKx3kS7f4A |
@ankitpati Every book and short story from Asimovs robotic series does exactly that. Show how the three/four laws create unsolvable contradictions. That’s their purpose. That’s why the books work.