A quite possibly triggery thought on the Three Laws of Robotics.

[roseembolism]

I came up with a rather unplesent thought experiment in a discussion on Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, explicating why I think they are fundamentally unethical.

The problem with the Three Laws is that they involve such high-level concepts, tthat he robots have to be sentient beings with human level intelligence in order for the concepts work. In which case, we're not really talking about programming, we're talking about brainwashing.

To distill the ethics of the Three Laws to their essence, let's change the target of the Laws. We'll change the wording as so:

1. A Negro may not injure a White or, through inaction, allow a White to come to harm.

2. A Negro must obey the orders given to it by Whites, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

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

Would you consider those laws ethical and moral? If not, why not? Bear in mind, the EXACT SAME arguments made for the necessity of those laws, also apply equally well to other groups of humans. Or rather, those arguments are equally false. If you argue for the necessity of cruelly enslaving robots using brainwashing, then you are also arguing that any other potential group of "others" must by necessity also be equally controlled.

Comments

[haamel.livejournal.com]

I've always been slightly mystified as to the stature the Three Laws have not just in the fannish sphere, but also with the lay public. Asimov himself was at great pains to show how the Laws were wholly insufficient to prevent, among other things, robots enslaving humanity in accordance with the "Zeroth" Law. The huge deal Asimov makes about the Laws being indelibly built into the positronic brain structure is a great example of what I might call "Clarke's One-Third Law" in action: sufficiently advanced magic that is indistinguishable from technology. And as such, rather difficult to draw realistically meaningful conclusions from.

Parenthetically, there is no real question about Asimov's robot architects: they specifically desired a work force they could keep under control. The "positronic" brain is an inherently fragile structure that one could demolish with a double-A battery or a little scuffed feet on the carpet (sources of electrons). The Laws do cognitively what the robots' makeup does physically.

As someone else pointed out, the Laws are not properly about brainwashing, but about the in-born nature of their bearers (which, like human nature, is not invalidated simply by the existence of "malfunctioning" individuals). IMO the ethical question is whether it is right to create sentient yet deliberately inferior beings, with or without the proviso that said beings might lack the capacity to grasp and/or resent that inferiority. This seems to me to devolve rapidly in a semantic quagmire over what it means for A to be "more" sentient than B. Does breeding dogs and cats for domestic purposes, for instance, qualify?

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

I agree that the point was to have a sentient race that logic games could be played with. But I don't think that lets Clarke off the hook for the brainwashing question. Leaving aside that I consider "human nature"to be a very diffuse category (Peru much any attempt to define it narrowly runs into the "all those people over there are "malfunctioning"), freedom of choice alows people to choose whether or not to obey imperatives. In that case, if people can choose not to eat meat, or not to have sex, then can over really call human nature innate? If we could force humans to obey rigid sets if directives, would calling them "natural" and "innate" be any less unethical?

And as far as "limited beings" being created with innate comments, well what if, through neural engineering we could create humans who have "Three Laws" equivalents from birth. Would that be any different from an ethics perspective?

[haamel.livejournal.com]

On one level, given a choice between compelling obedience, and compelling obedience AND inflicting suffering, one would have to say that compelling obedience without suffering would be less unethical. This, I suppose, is the basic difference between "Brave New World" and "1984". Stated differently: if there's an unpleasant task that *must* be done, one could justify utilizing an agent which will experience less discomfort during the task -- the question becomes how then to ascertain "necessity".

A being that had a human(-like?) body but a circumscribed consciousness is, in my view, not properly "human". I would draw a distinction between reducing a pre-existing human to such a state (such as via brainwashing), and growing such a being from scratch -- the former being more troubling than the latter... For me, this has something to do with the "potential" of a given being versus how it's allowed to express. The domestic dog, for instance, comes both in breeds that nobly adapt its wolf origins (such as herding dogs) as well as breeds that subvert that origin for what I call frivolous aesthetic reasons. All that being said, it could also be less immoral to keep a species around in acceptable form than to cause its extinction with its charateristics intact.