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Discord Invitation

17th April 2015

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Do we need Asimov's Laws? →

Paul Carr has brought my attention to this paper by Ulrike Barthelmess and Ulrich Furbach about Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. I believe that this paper may serve as a springboard for discussion in a future episode of The Unseen Podcast.

Are Asimov’s laws of robotics relevant or applicable today in light of ongoing work on robotics and AI? Let me approach this question tangentially.

When, in the past, I formerly read science fiction, and when I watch science fiction films today, I make a distinction between science fiction that employs primarily scientific ideas and science fiction that employs primarily poetic ideas.

While science fiction can serve as a thought experiment exploring possibilities of the future (one of the roles of science fiction in industrialized civilization), science fiction is also a literary genre, and at times the demands of story telling predominate over the demands science and technology. This is not a perfect distinction or an exhaustive distinction, but it regularly forces itself upon me in relation to science fiction ideas.

Let me cite some examples. The idea involved in the film AI, when near the end the mother is brought back for a single day, this is clearly a poetic idea (not unlike the equally poetic idea in the short story “All Summer in a Day”). The scientific idea would have been to clone the mother and bring her back but without any memories or continuity of identity. Such an idea might be no less poignant than the poetic idea, but it wasn’t the idea that interested the writer.

In the film Interstellar, on the other hand, the writers make full use of time dilation, exploiting the potential of the twin paradox to human effect. That is to say, the writer of Interstellar pursued the opportunity for the fictional use of a scientific idea that the writer of AI did not take. 

It is entirely possible that a work of science fiction might employ both poetic ideas and scientific ideas, and that an idea might have a mixed poetic and scientific character. This seems to me to be the case with Asimov’s three laws of robotics. The idea is primarily poetic, setting the stage for story telling, but Asimov did make an attempt to think through the idea to a degree that verges on a scientific treatment. 

It is entirely possible that someone today designing an expert system or an artificial intelligence might keep Asimov’s three laws in the back of their mind, in the same way that someone constructing a formal system of arithmetic might keep their arithmetical intuitions in mind, but the intuitive concepts of arithmetic would no more appear in the formal system than Asimov’s three laws would appear in an expert system or artificial intelligence formulated for the purpose of controlling a robot.

Tagged: Ulrike BarthelmessUlrich FurbachIsaac AsimovroboticsAIThe Unseen Podcast