But BOILING water.

Unless it’s green tea.

What rules would you give a thinking robot?

OK, tin-boy:

Tea is made with BOILING water poured on top of the leaves or bag, not boiled water. If it’s a bag, do NOT pour the milk in until it has been jiggled for at least TWO MINUTES.

Oh yeah, don’t be evil, three laws, all that stuff. But BOILING water.

The now emeritus Rous Ball Professor of Mathematics, Roger Penrose discussed this extensively in his popular books, albeit from a different angle; namely that science and mathematics are incomplete. It all amounts to the same thing really and slides into religious questions, but none that an orthodox practitioner would find Truth. Yet it is quite surprising to find athiests and thiests saying the same thing, and knowing that churches would thoroughly excommunicate the former over a vapid verbal formulation.

Anyway I am glad some people much more intelligent than I, have got computer networks working, and probably because I am so unimportant I have no problems with security. I treat my computer kindly, and listen carefully for what it is really saying to me. This is true, it is also weird – goodnight.

The thing about posting on the net is that you can be completely ignorant but claim to be, and come across as, the font of all knowledge on anything.

Well, yeah, but could you write a program to do it? If the program was designed with the three Asimov laws in mind, would it not point out spelling mistakes in posted articles to try not to hurt the feelings of the poster?

its clear everybody else knows a lot more about this than me.

One of the hazards of posting on the internet is that we geeks are darn near everywhere.

It has nothing whatever to do with the book, which (as I said above) was a collection of short stories.

In Paul’s example, the robot would either be able to tell that the person wasn’t actually starving or it would make some balance of probabilities guess about whether the person’s starving, and if they were starving, it would obtain food for the person rather than money. In the example about the car, all the cars would be able to react practically instantaneously to each other. In the Asimov world, humans are coddled by robots.

As people have commented here, by merely reprogramming a robot as to what a “human” was, robots could be made to do terrible things to humans.

Will Smith’s film didn’t bear much resemblance to any Asimov novel.

It’s also got some fairly repulsive scenes it which are not for the squeamish, however, so I link to it with a warning that caution be exercised.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/

Still, it’s recommended reading.

In Robots and Empire Asimov went on to postulate a “Zeroth Law”, that the needs of the human race come above any one robot [correction: human], in part based on the discovery that robots of a certain planet had been programmed to view offworlders as dangerous non-humans.

More generally, all of Asimov’s robot books might be seen as a damning attack on deontological morality. Or as pretty good reading in golden age scifi.

Anyway, the leading thinking in this whole area is the Friendly AI project, which posits that imposing rules on artificial intelligences is pointless. They propose instead that AIs must be built as “Friendly”, being motivated rather than constrained. Their argument is that as soon as the AI becomes motivated to break the rules, the rules are as good as broken.

See here: http://www.singinst.org/ourresearch/publications/CFAI/

* I fixed the spelling, shameless geek that I am.