The Three Laws of Robots, presented to be from the fictional “Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D.” by Isaac Asimov, are:
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the 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
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Recent events have made the 2004 Will Smith sci-fi thriller “I, Robot” a stealth hit on streaming.
There should probably be a corollary list for Action stars, –
“I will not stride on to the stage and slap the shit out of the MC at an Academy Award show.”
I’m a big fan of Asimov, and I’ve either read or listened to his entire Foundation series – great stuff. I love the character of Daneel.
But, what we’re building right now isn’t Daneel. It’s more akin to jump-starting a Miller-Urey Experiment on steroids, speeding the evolution of it beyond our capacity to track it safely, and hoping the end result helps us rather than hurts us. We don’t have any idea what we’re getting. We don’t even know if it’s actually conscious. It could be fully alien to us, or as it’s training on our own outputs, it could be a selfish and petty like us, or it could simply be a super advanced predictive model designed to complete its given task at any cost, including us (Yudkowsky’s theory). It could be anything. We don’t know have a grasp on intelligence, consciousness, and the evolutionary biology of those things well enough to know what we’re doing.
The tech companies approach is just – lets make a ton of money and totally change the world and hope it works out. That ain’t Asimov’s robot.
I, too, am a huge fan of Asimov so was pissed when the “I, Robot” movie bore little resemblance to the book of short stories of the same name. That said, I remain cautiously optimistic about AI vi LLM and suggest everyone here read chapter 9 which is about a network of A.I. computers used to manage Earth’s climate in order to maximize crop yield.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evitable_Conflict
Many Asimov fans do not know that Asimov published a list of 15 books that every true fan should read in order. Here is that list from my own web site:
https://neilrieck.net/links/cool_sci_fi.html#asimov-suggested-reading-order