The Human Resistance Report

Will robots adhere to the Three Laws?

By now, most of us are familiar with Asimov’s three laws of robotics.  Isaac Asimov was a science fiction author, with many notable works, including the famous  “I, Robot” .  Having written some of the first stories about robots, and so many of them, he also went so far as to declare a short constitution of laws that they should abide by – primarily known as the  “Asimov’s Three laws of Robotics.”

The idea is that if robots are programmed with these three laws in mind, then no harm should ever come to a human at the hands of a robot. Interesting to note that while functional robots seem relatively new today, these laws have been around for over 70 years now.  For those who need a reminder of what these three laws are, here they are as they first appeared in his book “Liar!”(1941) :

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

So the idea sounds good on the surface and we don’t have killer androids running around decapitating people and each other – following law as humans do. And at face value, the laws seems to work with each other very well , avoiding loopholes that the robot might use to get out of one the laws to hurt someone.  Of course any lawyer worth his salt  would be quick to point out that his client robot did not cause harm to anyone when he stole something form them….but that is a whole other discussion.

The main problem here is that robots are not even in full domestic production, and they are already going around breaking their own laws before they can even establish a presence in society.  Already, unwitting robots are being sent into other countries where they not only hunt down humans.. but also kill them. There have already been news reports going back as far as two years ago indicating that not only are bad guys in the crosshairs, but that sometimes civilian families with children get caught up in the mix and are killed right alongside intended targets.  Clearly this is a violation of the first law of robotics.

But a little research into the subject will find that this law applies specifically to robots acting on their own will. So far as we tell, the drones that are bombing targets are doing so under explicit command of military leaders.  But that doesn’t change the fact that the very nature of automated machines are being used as killing tools and it is no big stretch to imagine that someday they may allow them to make tactical decisions on their own and carry them out at will.

This is not very far off from what has already been happening for over a decade now with the Apache helicopter and other military weapon command centers  designed with a target acquisition systems able to identify enemy vehicles and people on the ground. It uses object recognition to determine whether an object is a jeep, a tank, a chopper or a human (among many other objects it can identify). It then uses this data and a computer algorithm to determine the order of importance and can then cue up the targets in the right order to eliminate.  When the ground commanders give the ok .. they press a button and all of the targets are taken out in short order using something they refer to as  “Fire and Forget”, pulling the trigger and knowing that there is about 100% chance that their target will be destroyed.

Such confidence in systems can only increase as artificial intelligence improves. The military has shown that they are indeed excited about the possibilities of sending battle bots into war instead of people… and why shouldn’t they be? By automating such messy tasks like bombing villages and gathering intel, human resources can be put to better use, like developing even smarter bombs and smarter robots to deliver them.  If they have proven accurate enough to provide reliable intel to humans in past battlefields, then future battlefields can see these robots given the authority to execute the targets they cue up with fire at will instructions.

The rules of robotics are going out the window and the idea that we could harness them in such a paradoxical triage of constraints is ridiculous to begin with. The very nature of the robot is as a tool, and Asimov even addressed this with the three laws that could be applied to all tools in the way that they apply to robots.. i.e .. Tools should be safe, use of them should be efficient unless it is not safe…ect.  But the main difference is that these are tools that can be programmed to do what their owners demand of them.  This means that robots will do anything or break any law that they are programmed to.

Even a very intelligent robot can be fooled into breaking their own laws by their own will. For example, if a robot was given the choice to save a human life at the expense of its own, would it do so?  Rule one says inaction is a violation so he must take action to save the human. Law Three says he must not destroy himself unless not doing so conflicts with laws one or two. So clearly he would give his ‘life’ for a human, if following the laws. But what if instead of his own life, he had to choose between two lives…. one of a child and one of an escaped criminal. Does (or should?) the robots have the aptitude to make a moral decision based on some subset of underlying values? Or does its brain just fry – unable to process,  uttering over and over again… cannot compute… cannot compute…

We can see here in that example that it will have to make a choice of some sort and either choice will break one of the laws. Action to save one is inaction to save the other.  We can also take from that that a robot would destroy itself if instructed to do so by a human, since he is bound by rule two.  Since his instruction given to him by a human to save both humans, perhaps, in order to avoid making a decision, it would self destruct. A more likely scenario is that it approach it like a task. Do one task , then the other, save one human .. go back and save the other human… but by the time he got back to the second human, the condition no longer existed as there was no longer a living human to save. The first human saved would live and  there would not be time for the second life to be saved, and as far as the droid is concerned , it has fulfilled its obligation to ‘save the humans’.

Chances are that robots will never truly follow the three laws, but may come within close proximity of it. Engineers making robots for uses other than carpet bombing will have to put a lot of thought into the decision tree robots will use to make choices in the absence of a human command.  Until robots actually develop an actual conscious, they will be relegated to executing the will of man… which generally does not even come close to the laws of robotics, thus exposing the fallacies of the Three laws.

Speculation has always been at the forefront of human story telling. Ever since we thought we figured out how mankind crawled out of the sludge and starting hunting for mammoths, we’ve been trying to retell the story. And if that doesn’t satisfy your yearning for enlightenment, we have  movies going even beyond our meager beginnings and foretelling the direction that evolution will continue in the future.  So here it is, the story of mankind from start to finish through the following five movies.

1. Walking with Cavemen (2003)

Walking with CaveMan

Here we see man at his earliest stage of life, discovering fire, learning how to use tools, inventing language, and perfecting hunting practices. It sets the pace as a good starting point for man. Here man’s challenges are documented as pre-evolutionary species of ancestors are cast aside until homosapiens emerge, conquering the world as the dominant species.  It is speculated in the film that our most prominent competitor was the Cro-Magnums and that they they were physically superior to Homo Sapiens.  The battle for supremacy however was won with brains, not brawn and eventually the Cro-Mangnums died off leaving behind a species that continues to use intelligence to tame the world around us.

 2. Citizen Kane (1941)

Citizen Kane was really about William Randolf Hearst

Thousands of years have passed and man has made much progress on the planet, but very little in the way of evolving physically. We seem to have evolved as much as we needed to adapt to life on this planet. So we  evolved the way we do things. Citizen Kane is great because it give a birds-eye view of what the modern world has become and takes place in a time when mankind is embracing media , and communications are becoming global, shrinking the world as we formerly knew it. Even more compelling is that  we see for the first time, the power of the media and the especially explosive power of media and money. The ability to manipulate world events with cameras sets the pace for a new society.  This important step in evolution is a prerequisite to the architecture that will allow those with enough money to rewrite history and influence the future of society.

3. Enemy of the state(1998)

Enemy of the State .. so real its scary!

In a world where surveillance cameras, information sharing, and satellite communications is normal and insignificant,  humans have become desensitized to big brother’s watchful eye. Given in to the idea that our safety requires no less, we are blind and blissful of how much of our world is being scrutinized under the watchful eye of the world’s computer data banks.  So volumes of personal data are gathered, and used in a variety of ways to extend the influence of those who access to the information.  Enemy of the State depicts a world that is exactly as it is today from a technological standpoint ( or at least it was in 1998). This is what makes this movie so scary and brilliant at the same time. The way that personal data, satellites, cameras and computers are used to profile, demonize, and politically assassinate anyone in its target is downright bone chilling. It highlights how easily a person can be tracked electronically,  shut out of financial assets,  lose credibility by use of  “out of context “video feeds, and basically leave you as a shut out , on the run from society in general . With the media spoon feeding us everything we want to believe and computers infallibly keeping track of everything we do, people are being reduced to pieces of information that can depicted anyway the media sees fit. With all of the world’s databases coming together and sharing data, all it takes is a few keystrokes to turn John Q. Public in to Jailbird Jimin the eyes of the public.

4. Minority Report

Think NATAL will be this cool?

The evolution of man continues as nuero drug experiements lead the ability to forsee  future events and an impresssive array of technology with which to prevent these future crimes from happening.  In this world , life is more cerebral, and experiences happen more in the mind than anything else. From drug use, to jail time, to sex orgies and fantasies – all of it happens in the minds of citizens under tightly controlled circumstances in a world were transparency is the norm.  This could be the first steps to a world where we have no use for our outer extremities, as we learn to experience more of life inside our own heads. Perhaps someday we will just give our minds over to the machines and let them take care of us…..which brings us to our last movie.

5. The Matrix

Daycare in the Matrix

Finally we have evolved to a higher level of existence. The machines, in performing their ultimate goal are taking care of our every need. The machines keep us alive and monitor our health, feed us with nutrients, dispose of any waste and even provide our mind a life program to keep us occupied. What more could one ask for from our future overlords? The matrix ask us to question whether or not we even exist or if we are simply living  out a program feed to our brains. Some philosophers ask “is this such a bad thing?”  I say yes, because if this is nothing but a program than I want to be able to change the channel when I want! In any case, this movie a prime example of how man supposes we could evolve  someday. In classic mankind style, we will fight it to the death before finally accepting it.