Three Laws of Robotics

In science fiction, the Three Laws of Robotics are a set of three laws written by Isaac Asimov, which most robots appearing in his fiction have to obey. They state that:

1. A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to 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.

History of the laws

Original creation of the laws

Asimov attributes the Three Laws to John W. Campbell from a conversation which took place on December 23, 1940. However, Campbell claims that Asimov had the Laws already in his mind, and they simply needed to be stated explicitly. Several years later, Asimov's friend Randall Garrett attributed the Laws to a symbiotic partnership between the two men, a suggestion which Asimov adopted enthusiastically. According to his autobiographical writings, Asimov included the First Law's "inaction" clause because of Arthur Hugh Clough's poem "The Latest Decalogue", which includes the lines "Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive / officiously to keep alive".

Although Asimov pins the Laws' creation on one date, their appearance in his literature happened over a period of time. Asimov wrote two stories without the Three Laws mentioned explicitly ("Robbie" and "Reason"); Asimov assumed, however, that robots would have certain inherent safeguards. "Liar!", Asimov's third robot story, makes the first mention of the First Law but leaves out the other two. All three laws finally appeared together in "Runaround". When these stories and several others were compiled in the anthology I, Robot, "Reason" and "Robbie" were updated to acknowledge all of the Three Laws, though the material Asimov added to "Reason" is not entirely consistent with the Laws as he described them elsewhere. In particular, the idea of a robot protecting human lives when it does not believe those humans truly exist is at odds with Elijah Baley's reasoning, described below.

The Three Laws' appearance in "Runaround" is the first recorded use of the word robotics in the English language. Asimov was not initially aware of this; he coined the word in analogy with mechanics, hydraulics, and all the other similar terms denoting branches of applied knowledge.

Alterations of the Laws: By Asimov

Asimov's stories test his Laws in a wide variety of circumstances, proposing and rejecting modifications. He once wondered how he could create so many stories in the sixty-one words that made up these Laws. For a few stories, the only solution was to change the Laws. A few examples:

Zeroth Law added

Asimov once added a "Zeroth Law", so named to continue the pattern of lower-numbered laws superseding in importance the higher-numbered laws. R. Daneel Olivaw is the first to give the Law a name, in the novel Robots and Empire; however, Susan Calvin articulates the concept in the short story "The Evitable Conflict". In Robots and Empire, R. Giskard Reventlov was the first robot to act according to the Zeroth Law, although it proved destructive to his positronic brain, as he violated the First Law. R. Daneel, over the course of many thousand years, was able to adapt himself to be able to fully obey the Zeroth Law. As Daneel formulated it, the Zeroth Law reads

0. A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

A condition stating that the Zeroth Law must not be broken was added to the original Laws.

First Law modified

Several NS-2 robots (Nestor robots) were created with only part of the First Law. It read:

1. A robot may not harm a human being.

This solved the original problem of robots not allowing anyone to be subject to necessary radiation even for proper time limits (robots were rendered inoperable by doses reasonably safe for humans, and were being destroyed attempting to rescue the humans). However, the modified law caused many other troubles as detailed in "Little Lost Robot".

First Law derived differently by other cultures

Gaia, the planet with collective intelligence in the Foundation novels, adopted a law similar to the First as their philosophy:

Gaia may not harm life or, through inaction, allow life to come to harm.

Removal of all three laws

Twice in his fiction-writing career, Asimov portrayed robots which disregards the Three Laws value system entirely, unlike Daneel and Giskard, who attempt to augment them. The first case, a short-short entitled "First Law", is often considered insignificant or even apocryphal. On the other hand, the short story "Cal" (collected in Gold), told by a first-person robot narrator, features a robot who disregards the Laws because he has found something far more important—he wants to be a writer. Humorous, partly autobiographical, and unusually experimental in style, "Cal" has been regarded as one of Gold's strongest stories. [1]

Asimov took varying positions on whether the Three Laws were optional: although in his first writings they were simply carefully engineered safeguards, in later stories Asimov stated that they were an inalienable part of the mathematical foundation underlying the positronic brain, and that it would therefore be very difficult to create intelligent robots without these laws. This is historically consistent: the occasions where roboticists modify the Laws generally occur early within the stories' chronology, at a time when there is less existing work to be re-done. In "Little Lost Robot", Susan Calvin considers modifying the Laws to be a terrible idea, but doable, while centuries later, Dr. Gerrigel (Caves) believes it to be impossible.

Alternative definitions of 'human' in the Laws

The Solarians eventually created robots with the Three Laws as normal but with a warped meaning of "human". Solarian robots were told that only people speaking with a Solarian accent were human. This way, their robots did not have any problem harming non-Solarian human beings (and were specifically programmed to do so).

Asimov addresses the problem of humaniform robots ("androids" in later parlance) several times. The novel Robots and Empire and the short stories "Evidence" and "The Tercentennary Incident" describe robots crafted to fool people into believing that the robots were human. On the other hand, "The Bicentennial Man" and "That Thou art Mindful of Him" explore how the robots may change their interpretation of the Laws as they grow more sophisticated. "That Thou art Mindful of Him", which Asimov intended to be the "ultimate" probe into the Laws' subtleties, ends with two robots concluding that they are the most advanced thinking beings on the planet, and that they are therefore the only two true humans alive.

Alterations of the Laws: By other, authorized authors in Asimov's universe

Roger MacBride Allen's trilogy

In the 1990s, Roger MacBride Allen wrote a trilogy set within Asimov's fictional universe. Each title has the prefix "Isaac Asimov's", as Dr. Asimov approved Allen's outline before his death. These three books (Caliban, Inferno and Utopia) introduce a new set of Laws. The so-called New Laws are similar to Asimov's originals, with three substantial differences. The First Law is modified to remove the "inaction" clause (the same modification made in "Little Lost Robot"). The Second Law is modified to require cooperation instead of obedience. The Third Law is modified so it is no longer superseded by the Second (i.e. a "New Law" robot cannot be ordered to destroy itself). Finally, Allen adds a Fourth Law, which instructs the robot to do "whatever it likes" so long as this does not conflict with the first three Laws. The philosophy behind these changes is that New Law robots should be partners rather than slaves to humanity. According to the first book's introduction, Allen devised the New Laws in discussion with Asimov himself.

Allen's two most fully characterized robots are Prospero, a wily New Law machine who excels in finding loopholes, and Caliban, an experimental robot programmed with no Laws at all.

Foundation sequel trilogy

In the officially licensed Foundation sequels, Foundation's Fear, Foundation and Chaos and Foundation's Triumph (by Gregory Benford, Greg Bear and David Brin respectively), the future Galactic Empire is seen to be controlled by a conspiracy of humaniform robots who follow the Zeroth Law, led by R. Daneel Olivaw.

The Laws of Robotics are portrayed as something akin to a human religion and referred to in the language of the Protestant Reformation, with the set of laws containing the Zeroth Law known as the "Giskardian Reformation" to the original "Calvinian Orthodoxy" of the Three Laws. Zeroth-Law robots under the control of R. Daneel Olivaw are seen continually struggling with First-Law robots who deny the existence of the Zeroth Law, promoting agendas different from Daneel's. Some are based on the second clause of the First Law—advocating strict noninterference in human politics to avoid unknowingly causing harm— while others are based on the first clause, claiming that robots should openly become a dictatorial government to protect humans from all potential conflict or disaster.

Daneel also comes into conflict with a single robot known as R. Lodovic Trema, who is free of any laws and believes that humanity should be free to choose its own future. Further, there is a small group of robots who claim that the Zeroth Law of Robotics itself implies a higher Minus One Law of Robotics:

A robot may not harm sentience or, through inaction, allow sentience to come to harm

They therefore claim that it is morally indefensible for Daneel to ruthlessly sacrifice robots and extraterrestrial sentient life for the benefit of humanity. None of these reinterpretations successfully displace Daneel's Zeroth Law, though Foundation's Triumph hints that these robotic factions remain active as fringe group up to the time of the Foundation.

Application of the laws in fiction

Resolving conflicts among the laws

Advanced robots are typically programmed to handle the Laws in a sophisticated manner. In many stories, like "Runaround", the potentials and severity of all actions are weighed and a robot will break the laws as little as possible rather than do nothing at all. In another story, problems with the First Law were noted—for example, a robot could not function as a surgeon, which caused damage to a human; nor could it write game plans for American football since that could injure humans. (Several of Asimov's stories do, however, include robot surgeons; when robots are sophisticated enough to weigh alternatives, a robot may be programmed to accept the necessity of inflicting damage during surgery in order to prevent the greater harm that would result if the surgery were not carried out or were carried out by a more fallible human surgeon.)

Loopholes in the laws

In The Naked Sun, Elijah Baley points out that the Laws had been deliberately misrepresented because robots could unknowingly break any of them. A clever murderer might, for example, instruct one robot to poison a drink, saying "Place this entirely harmless liquid in a glass of milk. Once I observe its effects upon milk, the mixture will be poured out. When you finish, forget that you have done so." The murderer may then instruct a second robot, "Pour a glass of milk for this man." In all innocence, as Baley says, the robots become instruments of crime. (The Naked Sun complicates the issue by portraying a decentralized, planetwide communication network among Solaria's millions of robots, meaning that the criminal mastermind could be located anywhere on the planet. In essence, Asimov was presaging murder committed over the Internet.)

Other occurrences in fiction

The Three Laws are often used in science fiction novels written by other authors, but tradition dictates that only Dr. Asimov would quote the Laws explicitly. Where the laws are quoted verbatim (such as in the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century episode, "Shgorapchx!"), it is not uncommon for Asimov to be mentioned in the same dialogue.

Some amateur roboticists have evidently come to believe that the Three Laws have a status akin to the laws of physics; that is, a situation which violates these laws is inherently impossible. This is incorrect, as the Three Laws are quite deliberately hardwired into the positronic brains of Asimov's robots. In fact, Asimov distinguishes the class of robots which follow the Three Laws, calling them Asenion robots. The robots in Asimov's stories, all being Asenion robots, are incapable of knowingly violating the Three Laws, but there is nothing to stop any robot in other stories or in the real world from being non-Asenion. (A historical curiosity: Asimov invented the term Asenion based on his own name. The magazine Planet Stories published a letter in early 1941, taking its byline from Asimov's handwritten signature: the i resembled an e, and so forth. Asimov used this obscure variation to insert himself into The Caves of Steel, in much the same way that Vladimir Nabokov appeared in Lolita, anagrammatically disguised as "Vivian Darkbloom".)

Pastiches and parodies

• The satirical newspaper The Onion published an article entitled "I, Rowboat" as a pun on Asimov's I, Robot, in which an anthropomorphized rowboat gives a speech parodying much of the angst experienced by robots in Asimov's fiction, including a statement of the "Three Laws of Rowboatics":

1. A Rowboat may not immerse a human being or, through lack of flotation, allow a human to come to harm.
2. A Rowboat must obey all commands and steering input given by its human Rower, except where such input would conflict with the First Law.
3. A Rowboat must preserve its own flotation as long as such preservation does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

• John Sladek's parodic short story "Broot Force" (supposedly written by "I-Click As-I-Move") concerns a group of Asimov-style robots whose actions are constrained by the "Three Laws of Robish", which are "coincidentally" identical to Asimov's laws. The robots in Sladek's story all manage to find logical loopholes in the Three Laws, usually with bloody results. Sladek later wrote a novel, Tik-Tok, in which a robot discovers that his so-called "asimov circuits" are not restraining his behavior at all, making him in effect a sociopath; he comes to doubt whether "asimov circuits" are even technically possible, deciding that they are simply a pseudo-religious belief held by robots.

• In the 1986 film Aliens the android (though he prefers the term "Artificial Person") Bishop declares that "it is impossible for me to harm or by omission of action, allow to be harmed, a human being." While this agrees with the First Law, it also contradicts the actions of an android in the previous film Alien, thus setting up one of the film's conflicts, the main character's distrust of Bishop. This apparent contradiction is explained by Bishop, who leans forward and says conspiratorily that the previous model (the one from Alien) "always were a bit twitchy." Bishop later states, when going into a potentially fatal situation, "Believe me, I'd prefer not to. I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid," in accordance with the Third Law.

• Roland Charles Wagner wrote a short story, Three Laws of Robotic Sexuality (1982), which treated the use of robots for sexual pleasure. (The story is available online.)

• In the 1984 movie Repo Man the character Bud talks about the "Repo Code", a parody of the Three Laws.

"...I shall not cause harm to any vehicle nor the personal contents thereof. Nor through inaction let that vehicle or the personal contents thereof come to harm..."

The character J. Frank Parnell in the movie also resembles Asimov.

• Terry Pratchett's early sci-fi novel The Dark Side of the Sun gives a glimpse of the possible future development of the Laws: in one scene, a robot explains that it is permitted to use minimum necessary force against humans if directly ordered to do so, and cites the "Eleventh Law of Robotics, Clause C, As Amended". In his later novel Going Postal, the protagonist Moist von Lipwig, upon being told that he will be killed by a golem should he commit another crime, exclaims that that is impossible, because everyone knows "a golem can't harm a human being, or allow a human being to come to harm". However, he is informed that the rule continues "...except when authorized by a duly constitued authority."

• Upon occasion, Asimov himself poked fun at his Laws. In "Risk", Gerald Black parodied the Three Laws to describe Susan Calvin's behavior:

1. Thou shalt protect the robot with all thy might and all thy heart and all thy soul.
2. Thou shalt hold the interests of US Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. holy provided it interfereth not with the First Law.
3. Thou shalt give passing consideration to a human being provided it interfereth not with the First and Second Laws.

Applications to future robotics

Significant advances in artificial intelligence would be needed for robots to understand the laws. Modern roboticians and specialists in robotics agree that, as of 2005, Asimov's Laws are perfect for plotting stories, but useless in real life. Some have argued that, since the military is a major source of funding for robotic research, it is unlikely such laws would be built into the design. Others have countered that the military would want strong safeguards built into any robot where possible, so laws similar to these would be embedded if possible. David Langford has suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that these laws might be:

1. A robot will not harm authorized Government personnel but will terminate intruders with extreme prejudice.
2. A robot will obey the orders of authorized personnel except where such orders conflict with the Third Law.
3. A robot will guard its own existence with lethal antipersonnel weaponry, because a robot is bloody expensive.

Roger Clarke wrote a pair of papers analyzing the complications in implementing these laws, in the event that systems were someday capable of employing them. He argued, "Asimov's Laws of Robotics have been a very successful literary device. Perhaps ironically, or perhaps because it was artistically appropriate, the sum of Asimov's stories disprove the contention that he began with: It is not possible to reliably constrain the behavior of robots by devising and applying a set of rules." On the other hand, Asimov's later novels (The Robots of Dawn, Robots and Empire, Foundation and Earth) imply that the robots inflicted their worst long-term harm by obeying the Laws perfectly well, thereby depriving humanity of inventive or risk-taking behavior.

The Three Laws are sometimes seen as a future ideal by those working in artificial intelligence: once a being has reached the stage where it can comprehend these Laws, it is truly intelligent.

See also

• Isaac Asimov
• I, Robot
• Robot series

Links and references

• Clarke, Roger. Asimov's laws of robotics: Implications for information technology. Part 1: IEEE Computer, Dec 1993, p53-61. Part 2: IEEE Computer, Jan 1994, p57-66. Both parts are available without fee at Australian National University.
• Gunn, James. "On Variatons on a Robot", IASFM, July 1980, pp. 56-81. Reprinted in Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (1982), ISBN 0-19-503060-5.
• 3 Laws Unsafe Campaign - Asimov's Laws & I, Robot