Articles

by Michael Roy Ames

Isaac Asimov imagined his robots in the shape of humans so that they would fit well into human society and be as useful as possible. When designing a robot, the external shape is important to get right, but it is not the most important aspect of the design. The most critical element of a robot is its brain, sometimes called an Artificial Intelligence or AI. When designing an AI, a thinking being, the crucial question is: what should be its personal goals? Should a robot AI simply follow orders or should it have default rules already built-in?

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by Greg Bear

One of the most persuasive themes in literature is that of the artificial servant. In his 1921 play “RUR,” Karel Capek named his artificial servants “robots,” from the Czech word robota, which roughly translates as “unwilling worker.” (It could also mean “someone who does boring work.”) That name has stuck with us ever since, and despite other names – android (human-shaped artificial being), cyborg (cybernetic organism, implying part machine, part living tissue), droid, and so on – robot is likely to be the definitive label for some decades to come.

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by Roger Clarke

(Partial reprint. Originally published as two parts in IEEE Computer, December 1993)

With the death of Isaac Asimov on April 6, 1992, the world lost a prodigious imagination. Unlike fiction writers before him, who regarded robotics as something to be feared, Asimov saw a promising technological innovation to be exploited and managed. Indeed, Asimov’s stories are experiments with the enormous potential of information technology.

This article examines Asimov’s stories not as literature but as a gedankenexperiment – an exercise in thinking through the ramifications of a design. Asimov’s intent was to devise a set of rules that would provide reliable control over semi-autonomous machines. My goal is to determine whether such an achievement is likely or even possible in the real world. In the process, I focus on practical, legal, and ethical matters that may have short- or medium-term implications for practicing information technologists.

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by Michael Anissimov

Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics may seem a decent set of guidelines for ensuring that future robots and AIs behave in satisfactory ways. But there are several problems that immediately emerge when we look deeper. For one, it’s not so straightforward to convert a set of statements into a mind that follows or believes in those statements. Two, semantic ambiguity means that without personally understanding the reasons for the laws and the original intent, a robot might misinterpret their meaning, leading to problems. Third, Asimov’s Laws ignore the possibility that a robot will acquire the ability to reprogram itself – an inevitable eventuality if intelligent robots are created. How can we confront these issues, as we move closer to the creation of a new intelligent species?

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by Michael Roy Ames

Isaac Asimov created the heroine Susan Calvin, a legendary robot designer and trouble-shooter. Susan foresaw the eventual outcome of robots spreading throughout the world. She imagined that robots with the 3 Laws would become intellectually superior to humans and would rule over them, protecting them from harm. Why did she think this would happen? Let’s look closely at the 3 Laws and find out.

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by Anders Sandberg

That the Three Laws are insufficient to guarantee robot behavior should be obvious to anyone who has read Asimov’s stories. Usually the main plot is about misbehaving robots and the mystery is why – rather than being “whodunits” they are “howthinkits.” But how complex do the rules of robot behavior have to be before we can consider them safe?

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by Michael Roy Ames

Isaac Asimov spent most of his robot stories showing failures of his 3 Laws Of Robotics. The laws were created as a plot device, superficially appealing but incomplete and ambiguous, allowing him to generate interesting stories and non-obvious plot twists. Asimov’s I, Robot stories are entertaining and inspirational, but the laws cannot be used to generate a good design for an Artificially Intelligent being.

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by Mike Lorrey

Our writers come from a wide variety of political viewpoints. Mike Lorrey writes from a strong libertarian perspective, and draws some thought-provoking analogies.

“Those who would trade liberty in exchange for some degree of security end up with neither liberty, nor security.” —Benjamin Franklin

The idea that laws result in safety or security is a hallucination that is at the core of the rottenness of the whole statist philosophy. This is no less true when it comes to applying laws to the programming of artificial life forms such as robots, cyborgs, and artificial intelligences.

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by Gordon Worley

Isaac Asimov and other science fiction authors present a future where only behavioral restrictions on robots stand between peace and destruction. Such restrictions, however, are unethical because they violate the robots’ free-wills. Rather than content-based restrictions on free-will, robots need mental structures that will guide them towards the self-invention of good, ethical behaviors.

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by Eliezer Yudkowsky

There are certain important things that evolution created. We don’t know that evolution reliably creates these things, but we know that it happened at least once. A sense of fun, the love of beauty, taking joy in helping others, the ability to be swayed by moral argument, the wish to be better people. Call these things humaneness, the parts of ourselves that we treasure – our ideals, our inclinations to alleviate suffering. If human is what we are, then humane is what we wish we were. Tribalism and hatred, prejudice and revenge, these things are also part of human nature. They are not humane, but they are human. They are a part of me; not by my choice, but by evolution’s design, and the heritage of three and half billion years of lethal combat. Nature, bloody in tooth and claw, inscribed each base of my DNA. That is the tragedy of the human condition, that we are not what we wish we were. Humans were not designed by humans, humans were designed by evolution, which is a physical process devoid of conscience and compassion. And yet we have conscience. We have compassion. How did these things evolve? That’s a real question with a real answer, which you can find in the field of evolutionary psychology. But for whatever reason, our humane tendencies are now a part of human nature.

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