Articles: 3 Laws Don't Quite Cut It

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3 Laws Don't Quite Cut It

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?

Asimov answered this question by creating the Three Laws of Robotics, making it the goal of his imaginary robot AIs to obey Three Laws. This worked very well to make entertaining science fiction stories, but is it a good idea for robots in the real world? The following are Asimov’s laws:

The Three Laws of Robotics

A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

These laws look quite good upon first reading; they seem to be a reasonable guide for an intelligent being toward behaviour that a normal person would find acceptable, if not exemplary! Of course, it is easy to assume that a robot would interpret the laws the same way a human being would, but there is a problem. A human will have human goals and a variety of other mental imperatives such as breathing, eating and drinking, securing shelter and safety, finding love, building a family, etc. Asimov’s robots do not have any of these goals or imperatives; their only goal is to obey the 3 Laws. This will lead to many problems, because the robot will interpret the laws differently from a human since it has different goals. Laws and goals are different things, but the two are mixed together in Isaac Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics. The dictionary definitions of “law” and “goal” are:

LAW n. rule of action or procedure commanding or forbidding certain actions.
GOAL n. object of ambition or effort.

There are also other differences between human and robot interpretations. A 3 Laws robot will have very different experiences of the world in comparison to a human. How can we expect it to obey laws like a human without the experience of growing up through childhood and into adulthood as a human? We can’t expect that; it won’t happen automatically. An even worse problem is that a 3 Laws robot would have none of the moral framework of a human adult; none of the appreciation for beauty or the love of family and community, nor the wisdom to determine right from wrong. According to a 3 Laws robot, the “right thing to do” has nothing to do with wisdom; the right thing to do is forever fixed as “obey the 3 Laws.”

Human-made laws work well in human society because people have reasons and motivations to follow the rules. There are many motives, both positive and negative. A positive example is: “If I follow the law, then society will operate more smoothly, and we will all be better off.” The human motivation here is altruism, to benefit others, and also selfishness because benefiting society indirectly benefits the self. “To avoid punishment for breaking laws,” is an obvious example of the negative. But a 3 Laws robot shares none of these human motivations. All an Asimovian robot brain knows is to follow the 3 Laws. If the 3 Laws do not seem to apply, what happens then?

If human beings encounter a completely new problem, then they will do various things to try and solve it. Problem solving requires intelligence, and the more intelligent humans are the better they can solve new and unique problems. If robots are to obey the 3 Laws like an intelligent human they will also have to be intelligent. Robots would have to be at least as intelligent as humans to understand how we want the laws obeyed. But, as we have already seen, 3 Laws robots have different motivations from humans; their motivation is simply to obey the 3 Laws. Therefore a 3 Laws robot will always obey the laws differently from a human. A ready example is when a human being wants to do something where there is a risk of harm, such as crossing a street. What would a robot do when observing that situation? It might restrain the person from crossing a street, even if the risk of harm was low. And there are other, even more troubling, problems.

The goal of “obedience to a set of laws” does not account for exceptions to the laws, or future changes to the laws. Even worse from the point of view of us poor humans: what if the laws are flawed? Or what if we made a mistake and they are flat-out wrong? There will be many new situations occurring in the future, and the laws we come up with today will not be perfect tomorrow – they will need to be modified. But laws are notoriously slow to change in human society, and there is no reason to suspect that robots will be upgraded with new sets of laws fast enough to keep up with new situations. This is true even today with ordinary computer software that is quickly and automatically updated online to fix bugs and “vulnerabilities.” Despite our greatest efforts, new invasions of internet worms and software viruses still cause havoc before the software can be patched to handle a new situation. So… is there no hope for these great-sounding 3 Laws? Would a truly intelligent robot AI find creative ways to make the laws work the way they were intended?

Taking the First Law as an example, a truly intelligent 3 Laws robot might find ways to creatively obey the law. The last part of the First Law states that a robot may not, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. This directly implies that, if a human being might come to harm, the robot must take action. It would not take long observing humans for an intelligent robot to conclude that there are many situations during daily life when a human might come to harm. Some of the more frequent accidents are auto collisions, slipping and falling, and back injuries due to lifting heavy objects. A 3 Laws robot would certainly want to take action to prevent these harmful events. A robot might not let you drive because of the risk of collision, or walk when the ground is wet because you might slip. Perhaps a robot would prevent you from getting out of bed – after all your body is quite heavy, and you might fall and hurt yourself. These examples may seem humorous or trivial, but you wouldn’t be laughing if they actually happened.

Asimov’s robotic laws were designed by a writer for literary purposes, and his stories were often interesting because the robots’ behaviour was not the behaviour expected of humans. Unexpected outcomes make for interesting story telling but would be very uncomfortable as a lifestyle, especially if it involved imprisonment by an overprotective 3 Laws robot. There are many reasons why creating an intelligent being with goals to “obey laws” will inevitably lead to failure; this article only covers a few of them. Using laws as goals cannot work, and even ten thousand laws are not enough. The failures would continue, in slightly different ways with different sets of laws, but for the same reasons as they fail for 3 Laws. Laws don’t prevent catastrophes, or make good behaviour certain. Only rational thinking beings, who have goals of working in cooperation with humans, could obey laws we specify; and then continue to obey the spirit of the laws when the original laws no longer make sense. Such beings will not be bound by laws because of a few lines of computer code, but because they are complex moral beings that can reason about the world and choose to do what is right.

For further information about alternatives to the 3 Laws, see http://www.singinst.org/intro/

Comments

I would like to address a few points that were simply (and incorrectly) taken as axioms in this essay.

The first is that robots in Asimovian stories were ever meant to be more than servants. They are not. Very few are meant to be fully independent entities: they are considered the property and servant of their owners. Therefore, they are designed to not have aspirations: their only aspirations are indeed to carry out the functions (or as you choose to call them, the goals) assigned to them by humans within the framework of the Three Laws.

The second is the relationship between each and their guiding principles. A properly programmed robot will follow the human judicial laws as well as the cardinal Three Laws because it lacks the mental ability to do anything else. Should none of the three laws apply (that is to say, there are no humans in danger, no human orders are in effect, and no self-preservative measures are required), then the robot will simply halt in place until something occurs that triggers a response. This stands in stark contrast to the human brain, which has a long tendency of acting unpredictably, without regard to laws or other restrictions.

Your mention of upbringing and morals placing humans in a position above Asimovian robots is exactly reversed: in the case of morals or laws, this is because a human may disregard them all at will, a robot cannot. For example, you consider altruism to be a human virtue but conveniently forget its converse, sheer greed. Take the “purse-snatch” sequence in the movie: whereas humans may be motivated by greed to steal, the idea would not occur to an Asimovian robot. Likewise, a human charged with a responsibility may choose to perform it, or to instead demonstrate sloth: a robot will perform the responsibility without fail. You bring up computer worms, virii, and other modern computer problems as an example of flexibility and ability to respond to changing situations: I’d remind you that humans are behind every one. Unlike biological virii and plagues, every piece of hostile computer code was written by a human who sat down at a keyboard with the thought, “I will put forth my skills and abilities to writing a computer program with the sole purpose of ruining other people’s computers.”

Upbringing, similarly: A human may have a range of childhood experiences ranging from the successful and organized upbringing that you assume as standard, to a chaotic wreck. Consider a child who witnesses his parents constantly fighting verbally until one silences the other with a physical blow—or is frequently silenced himself in such a manner: this child will thus learn that might makes right, that a slap or a punch wins all arguments, and will use the same tactic in adulthood. No robot could have this problem: a robot will have the same basic programming, time after time, and nothing that happens after it leaves the factory can overwrite the Three Laws.

In an Asimovian framework, there may be a robotic Albert Einstein (having been charged with solving complex mathematical puzzles) or Mother Teresa (motivated by an unusual interpretation of the First Law instead of by religion), but there can never be a robotic John Wayne Gacy (psychotic serial killer) or Spanish Inquisition (also motivated by religion, you may recall).

Other authors in this series address the issue of robotic mollycoddling, and Asimov addresses the issue of unbreakable logic loops. My conclusion: it is important to note that a robot that is built with an intelligence as indepenent as a human’s is free to choose what is wrong as freely as to choose what is right.

Posted by: Ishidan at July 21, 2004 06:12 AM

Your example of the first law causing a robot to keep you in bed is addressed by Asimov’s stories. There is a balance put into place by the implementation of these three laws, which allows the second law to increase in importance compared to low-risk dangers. It is also clear that he did not imagine simple text-based laws, but rather that the text of the laws is the human interpretation of the programing and structure of a 3-law robot.

And your points about emotional and experiential background just don’t apply to a robot either, because the three laws as written are the human-understandable definition of them, but not the way they are implemented. In his stories, they aren’t creating artificial intelligent beings and then telling them they must obey some written laws. They are creating positronic computers with these three laws built into their structure. (Who knows how they do that, but that isn’t the point.)

Our own early robots could easily have these instructions built into them. The difficult part is defining what a human is, what harm is, how to tell a human order from a robot order, etc… Assuming the computer is capable of making these determinations, it is very straightforward to apply these laws in programming.

Posted by: Trebor Pugly at July 21, 2004 09:49 AM

The irony of the “purse-snatch” sequence in the movie is that the 3 laws in no way prevents a human from instructing a robot to snatch someone’s purse. Asimov addressed this very issue in one of his stories and came to the same conclusion that many people have in the past. A robot is a tool and will serve whatever ends mankind makes of it.

Posted by: QuantumG at July 23, 2004 02:05 AM

>> in no way prevents a human from instructing a robot to snatch someone’s purse.<<

Well, the human can instruct and law #2 will kick in but presumably law #1 will toss it out since the snatchee will be “harmed”.

Or will she?

That’s the fun Asimov had in the stories. In this case, would a robot correctly understand that though a woman might not be physically harmed from a purse snatching that she would be financially and emotionally harmed?

One would think that the answer is yes but it comes down to how the robot is programmed or is able to learn what “harm” means.

Another issue that I think is worth exploring is whether we should presume that conscience, ethics, morality, and emotion automatically come along for the ride with intelligence.

It’s how our minds work but one could argue that it’s because we were “made that way”. Who but the designer knows why.

It doesn’t seem to me that it needs to be that way.

So for example, the issue of whether you are treating an intelligence as a slave is of concern only if that intelligence knows the difference and cares.

If not, isn’t the question moot?

Posted by: Stan Baptista at July 27, 2004 04:00 PM

To clarify QuantumG’s post, “the movie” refers to “I, Robot”. I suspect a lot of moviegoers will not realise that the laws were written by a science fiction writer decades ago. I’m not saying QuantumG is one of those people, but a fair few would try to tell you that the inventor of the 3 laws was Professor Lanning, the character in the film.

I agree that the laws don’t stop a human from telling a robot to snatch a purse from another, since no harm is involved (or a statistically negligible chance). But the point is that the laws are a final safeguard, even if all other programming goes awry, that robots can at least do no harm. They would presumeably have additional programming to recognise the concept of possession, and that removing possessions without the permission of the owner is “wrong”. However they do argue in the film that it is a “3 Laws” issue which it is not.

I also agree with Trebor in that the English version of the laws (as opposed to a machine version) is full of ambiguities that we gloss over because we understand it in our social context, such as what constitutes harm (physical or emotional?), which rely on a solid implementation by the programmer to actually work how we would expect it to.

Posted by: Nic H at August 16, 2004 03:18 PM