Three Laws of Robotics
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Three Laws of Robotics are a set of three rules written by science fiction author Isaac Asimov and later expanded upon. These rules are built in to almost all positronic robots appearing in his fiction and cannot be bypassed. The rules are introduced in his 1942 short story Runaround although they were foreshadowed in a few earlier stories.
The Three Laws of Robotics, often referred to as The Three laws, are as follows:
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey any orders given to 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.
The Three Laws form an organizing principle and unifying theme for Asimov's fiction, appearing in his Robot series, the other stories linked to it and his Lucky Starr series of young-adult fiction. Other authors working in Asimov's fictional universe have adopted them and references, often parodic, appear throughout science fiction as well as in other genres.
See also
- Roboethics
- Tilden's Law of Robotics
- Friendliness Theory – a theory which states that, rather than using "Laws", intelligent machines should be programmed to be basically altruistic, and then to use their own best judgement in how to carry out this altruism, thus sidestepping the problem of how to account for a vast number of unforeseeable eventualities
- Military robots that mostly do not follow the laws of robotics.
