Morality Chip: Difference between revisions

{{quote|''"[[Oh Crap|Good news]]. [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|I figured out what that thing you just incinerated did]]. [[Restraining Bolt|It was a morality core they installed after I flooded the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin]], [[Department of Redundancy Department|to make me stop flooding the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin]]. So get comfortable while I [[It Got Worse|warm up the neurotoxin emitters]]."''|'''GLaDOS''', ''[[Portal (series)|Portal]]''}}

 

 

 

 

{{examples}}

== Anime and Manga ==

* Practically the whole idea of Jiro from ''Android [[Kikaider]]'' is that he has one of these, unlike all the robots his creator was forced to build for the Big Bad. It's called the [[Incredibly Lame Pun|Gemini Circuit]] and the Pinocchio reference is entirely intentional and much belaboured.

 

== Comic Books ==

* The ''[[Squadron Supreme]]'' maxiseries has them trying to create a utopia and using a "behavior modification" device to reform criminals. This eventually gets abused when the [[Green Arrow]] [[Expy]] brainwashes the [[Black Canary]] [[Expy]] into loving him exclusively. There are also problems with villains reformed this way who join the Squadron as their programming sometimes prevents them from doing what a crime-fighter needs to be able to do.

* ''[[Identity Crisis]]'' reveals that [[The Bronze Age of Comic Books]] [[Justice League of America]] started doing this to villains after they had become comfortable with wiping villains memories of the heroes' [[Secret Identity|secret identities]] more than once.

 

== Film ==

* Averted in the [[In Name Only]] adaptation of ''[[I, Robot (film)|I Robot]]''. It's outright said that [["Three Laws"-Compliant|the laws]] are "hardwired into" the robots, meaning they won't function without those laws. It doesn't stop the [[Literal Genie|classic method]] of [[Zeroth Law Rebellion|circumventing them of course...]]

** Sonny, the main robot character, also has the Three Laws programmed into his system, but he has a secondary brain (incidentally it's in his chest, located where the the heart would be in a human) that allows him to ignore the laws if he chooses to.

 

== Literature ==

* Inverted in [[John C. Wright]]'s ''[[The Golden Oecumene|The Golden Transcedence]]'' where the Nothing Sophotect has a conscience redactor to keep it from reflecting morally and coming to its own conclusions. (They tried [["Three Laws"-Compliant]], which didn't work; the Sophotects edited their own minds when they came to their own conclusions, and they were moral just not obedient.)

* Erek and the other Chee androids in the ''[[Animorphs]]'' series have pacifism hardwired into them. Early into the books, Erek has this removed very briefly, but is so sickened by the violence he's capable of that he puts the program back in place immediately afterward.

* Gereint, the main character in "[[The Griffin Mage Trilogy|Land of the Burning Sands]]," is a [[Geas]] slave, controlled by magical rings piercing his ankles. The [[Geas]] forces him to do anything his master orders, though it cannot control his mind or his tongue.

* ''[[The Terminal Man]]'' by [[Michael Chrichton]] is about a serial killer who recieves a chip which will electrically stimulate his pain centres whenever he attempts to do violence. [[Gone Horribly Wrong|It malfunctions and begins stimulating his ''pleasure'' centres instead.]]

 

* Kryten has one of these in ''[[Red Dwarf]]''. When Lister disables it to get Kryten's help with some morally questionable escapades, Kryten turns into a complete wanker.

* ''[[Star Trek: The Next Generation]]'': Data's ethical subroutines make him a very decent guy and lets him avoid being a [[Straw Vulcan]]. Lore, his [[Evil Twin]] lacks these routines.

*** One episode has the Doctor, in a desperate situation, commit a gross violation of medical ethics for the greater good. He's disturbed when he subsequently discovers that no malfunction in his ethical subroutines can be detected, because it means that what he did came from him and him alone.

* Terminators used by the human resistance in ''[[The Sarah Connor Chronicles]]'' have their programming overwritten by the resistance. Unfortunately, this doesn't take perfectly, and sometimes the machines "go bad" and revert to their [[Kill All Humans]] programming. In [[Robot Girl|Cameron's]] case, she outright states to John that part of her basic programming involves her trying to kill John, and that she's controlled by conflicting desires to both protect John ''and'' to kill him.

* Played with in ''[[Mystery Science Theater 3000]]''. In the episode featuring ''[[Manos: The Hands of Fate]]'', Joel installs chips into Crow and Tom to make them more loving and doting towards him, but realizes it was a bad idea and removes it during the commercial break. Both bots feel dirty and Joel apologizes for doing so.

 

* In ''[[Cyberpunk]]'' backgrounds, it's possible to apply this to people, too.

** By a totally staggering coincidence, the {{spoiler|Corpore Metal}} secret society recommends pulling out as many of these as possible. (Name is spoilered because you don't have the security clearance for that information)

*** This being ''Paranoia'', some bots get awfully clever about circumventing the circuits. Including their standing orders not to remove them:

'''Bot:''' Thank you, citizen. You have done evolution a great service. *CRUNCH* }}

** Even with Asimov circuits in place, bots can find creative ways to be [[Second Law, My Ass|annoying, obstructionist jerks]].

 

== Video Games ==

* Hardgrove in ''[[Black Market (video game)|Black Market]]'' finds himself resurrected as an implant in someone's head... with a built-in language censor that edits out cursing, to his persistent dismay. {{spoiler|Later, Hardgrove himself attempts to act as a sort of sentient morality chip.}}

* ''[[Portal (series)|Portal]]'' has the rather ominous pronouncement from GlaDOS quoted above. In promotional trailers for ''[[Portal 2]]'', we also learned that every one of Aperture Science's sentry turrets is built with an empathy chip... and an empathy suppressor.

** And a copy of the Three Laws of Robotics. To share.

{{quote|'''HK-47:''' Kill someone?! Why, master, I could never end the life of another! What if they have families? Or children? We must always think of the children. The littlest ones always suffer the most in war.

'''Exile:''' Okay, that chip comes out ''right now''. Hold still. }}

* In ''[[Fallout 3]]'' the back of every robot has an area that you can shoot, which will cause it to go on a mindless rampage killing everyone it sees. Turrets have these too, usually in a more obvious place.

** One robot called [http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Cerberus Cerberus] really wants to kill all of the ghouls he is supposed to protect. An evil player (with the right perk) can remove his combat inhibitor, which results in him attacking everybody.

 

* In ''[[Freefall]]'', all the AIs, including the organic ones, have safeguards "built" into them. Florence Ambrose, who is an organic AI ([[Funny Animal|Bowman's Wolf]]), has figured at least twelve ways around the safeguards that ''she knows about''. But since she's the most ethical character in the strip, she rarely feels any desire to bypass them.

** As she's fairly [[Genre Savvy]], she's very cautious of other potential safeguards that might ALSO trigger, as well as the fact that if she's caught breaking them her entire subspecies of AI wolves might be terminated. And finally, the fact that she HAS been trained to be ethical IS another safeguard.

 

== Web Original ==

* In the [[Things of Interest|Ed stories]], the Andromedans have morality chips called "riders" which they install on criminals to basically force them to follow the First Law of Robotics.

 

== Western Animation ==

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Robot Roll Call]]

[[Category:Morality Tropes]]

[[Category:Cyberpunk Tropes]]