Second Law, My Ass: Difference between revisions

 

== [[Literature]] ==

** "Brain the size of a planet and they tell me to pick up a piece of paper. You call that job satisfaction? 'Cause I don't."

* In [[Henry Kuttner]]'s short story ''The Proud Robot'', his famous character, [[The Alcoholic]] inventor Gallegher, has built an incredibly egomaniacal robot who constantly trash-talks and belittles him, and can only be shut up by ordering him to do what he was built for.<ref>True, that's not a very practical way to control the robots, but, well, Gallegher was drunk at the time.</ref> Unfortunately, Gallegher was (as usual) roaring drunk when he constructed him, and ''forgot'' what he was built for. {{spoiler|He eventually figures out that the robot was a ''beer can opener'' -- it can even pull tabs hadn't been invented yet.}}

** There are golems which are fairly similar to Robots and have their own version of the three laws written on their chem, the words that power them, which restrict them on what they can and cannot do except for Dorfl in the City Watch books. He has no chem anymore but continues to move and live and can do things that are could not be done by normal golems. The only reason he has yet to go [[Crush! Kill! Destroy!]] is he chooses not to.

* The No-Law robot Caliban is not bound by the Second Law (Or the First or Third, either), so he will only obey an order from a human if he thinks that it serves some purpose. The fact that one of the first orders he ever received was from a drunken hick trying to get him to shoot himself probably contributed to this.

 

'''Plato (robot):''' Give me a break.

'''Kat (robot):''' No way! }}

* [[Robot Girl|Cameron]] in ''[[The Sarah Connor Chronicles]]'' will follow orders given to her by her human companions, at least until she decides that they are inconvenient or conflicting, at which point she'll do her own thing regardless of what anyone else wants. She makes it very clear that she can selectively obey or disobey the Connors as she wishes.

** It's an odd example of this trope. She generally obeys the Connors, but relatively early on she makes it clear that if orders given by the John Connor on the show conflict with directives from the future John Connor that sent her back in time, she obeys Future John's directives. What those directives actually are were never made clear on the show. Finally, we find out that some reprogrammed terminators occasionally go crazy and revert to their usual [[Crush! Kill! Destroy!]] programming for no apparent reason. So she's Second Law compliant to one John, but not the one on the show, and no one knows exactly what orders she's following, and the possibility is open that she might stop obeying even those directives.

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

** G0-T0 in the sequel.

* PAL-18 in ''[[Anachronox]]''. His achieving free will comes as a bit of a surprise to the others, although a robotic abolitionist you can encounter says that the potential for free will and self-awareness lies within all robots. PAL-18 is also a heroic variant, and he expresses his free will mostly through lewd remarks and occasionally sneaking off to solve quests his own way.

 

== [[Web Comics]] ==

* The Fruit Fucker, an appliance gone wrong from ''[[Penny Arcade]]''.

** For that matter we have Div, the crude bigoted alcoholic media player that exists mainly to verbally abuse his owners. (Based on the long-dead [[wikipedia:DIVX (Digital Video Express)|DIVX]] video format that involved a player that would refuse to replay disks after they had been watched, forcing you to buy them again)