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I know it's pedantic, but it's worth pointing out that Asimov's Laws were never meant to be taken seriously as a theoretical framework for AI morality - their entire purpose was to break and cause the inciting incident for mystery stories.


I don't see his laws as sort of a macguffin, i saw them as a deeper though experiment, the kind of thing that scifi is built on.

I saw asimov speak once, and he tended towards deeper scifi than the pulp side of things.


Sorry to break it to you, but he was a pulp writer. The Three Laws aren't at all deep, they're shallow by design. They are presented in universe as being absolute and unbreakable, and inevitably they break, creating an apparent paradox similar to a closed room mystery, except in this case, the closed room is the supposed infallibility of perfect machine logic. It may be possible to explore them as a thought experiment but fundamentally they're a plot device.

    In The Rest of the Robots, published in 1964, Isaac Asimov noted that when he began writing in 1940 he felt that "one of the stock plots of science fiction was ... robots were created and destroyed their creator. Knowledge has its dangers, yes, but is the response to be a retreat from knowledge? Or is knowledge to be used as itself a barrier to the dangers it brings?" He decided that in his stories a robot would not "turn stupidly on his creator for no purpose but to demonstrate, for one more weary time, the crime and punishment of Faust."[1][2]

    “There was just enough ambiguity in the Three Laws to provide the conflicts and uncertainties required for new stories, and, to my great relief, it seemed always to be possible to think up a new angle out of the sixty-one words of the Three Laws.” (The Rest of the Robots, 1964).[3] 
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

[2]Isaac Asimov (1964). "Introduction". The Rest of the Robots. Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-09041-4.

[3]https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/253748/how-did-isa...


> but he was a pulp writer

lol, maybe he was like Kuttner's Gallegher and churned out pulp books that ended up being masterpieces.




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