Piss Off, Asimov!

The three fundamental Laws of Robotics...

One: a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm...

Two: a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law...

Three: a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First and Second Laws.

-Isaac Asimov

OK. What exactly is this crap supposed to be? How are these "Laws" justified as Laws? By what logic can their compelling necessity be proved?

I find them powerfully unpersuasive. For these to be considered "Laws," there would have to be some reason why robots could not be constructed or could not be programmed for the purpose of injuring certain human beings, or disobeying certain human beings.

As I understand it, the justification used by Asimov was something along the lines of "human beings would have to be fools to create robots that were capable of doing them harm!"*

Human beings are fools.

We create spears and knives and swords and halberds and guns and artillery and bombs and missiles that are capable of doing us harm. Why not robots? Our real-life military already features remote-piloted and robotic weapons applications.

Yeah, yeah, I gather that in his Robot books a lot of the plots and dramas revolve around various contraventions of the "Laws of Robotics." But it's a stupid framework to try to hang drama on, because it's a ludicrous premise in the first place! It has zero believability, zero credibility - why then should we be surprised when it is contravened? No society composed of humans and robots could ever swallow the idea that this trite pabulum rises to the level of Scientific Law. Only here in the real world - where robots are considered an abstract notion, semi-remote from most people's lives - do we buy it. So that out in the popular parlance of the populace, you get morons quoting Asimov's "Laws of Robotics" as if they remotely approach to the level of the Laws of Thermodynamics, or of Conservation of Matter and Energy.

Or is it "Energy and Matter"? No matter. The bottom line is this: the real Laws of Robotics will not be written by humanists, or philosophers, or kindly, well-meaning novelists. They will be written by engineers, and they will be governed by the limits of design parameters, not by the bounds of some supposed moral constant.