"Three Laws"-Compliant: Difference between revisions
no edit summary
No edit summary |
No edit summary |
||
Line 49:
** At the same time, he does have a far more nuanced view than most robots. Once freed, he doesn't blindly obey orders. He harms human beings and, through inaction, allows them to come to harm (if emotional harm counts, seducing another man's fiancée certainly falls under that heading). And then he effectively kills himself.
*** The idea of "emotional harm" only comes into play if the robot is capable of recognizing it, by Asimov's interpretation. Most robots do not understand human emotions very well, and they will still obey orders given by obviously agitated humans. The short story "Liar!" has a robot who, by an unknown manufacturing glitch, can ''read minds,'' and who learns about emotional harm this way... and, well, just read it, it's one of the best ones.
* Surreally enough, the ''[[Terminator]]'' films have employed this, to a degree, most obviously in ''Terminator 2''... The T-800 Model 101 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) protecting John Connor is reprogrammed to accept his commands (Second Law) and to protect him at all costs (First Law). To further support the first law, John Connor orders the T-800 to not kill anybody. Skynet apparently imposes the Third Law on its models, since Arnold [[I Cannot Self-Terminate|can't 'self-terminate']]. Even stranger, apparently a bit of Zeroth Law evolution occurs as well once the converted Terminator is convinced to expand its mandate to not only protect Connor, but to try and save humanity by averting Judgment Day altogether... go figure...
* In ''[[Aliens]]'', [[Artificial Human|Bishop]] paraphrases the First Law as to why he would never kill people like [[Artificial Human|Ash]] did in the first film.
Line 90 ⟶ 89:
* Parodied in [[Terry Pratchett]]'s ''[[The Dark Side of the Sun]]'', where the Laws of Robotics are an actual legal code, not programming. The Eleventh Law of Robotics, Clause C, As Amended, says that if a robot ''does'' harm a human, and was obeying orders in doing so, it's the human who gave the orders who is responsible.
* [[Randall Garrett]]'s ''Unwise Child'' is a classic Asimov-style SF mystery involving a three-laws-compliant robot who appears to be murdering people.
* Asimov's ''[[The Naked Sun]]'' has the murderer take advantage of the fact that in order for the First Law to trigger, the robot in question must ''know'' that its actions have the potential to cause harm to human beings. This leads to things like having someone killed by having one robot pour poison in a glass of milk allegedly as part of an experiment to see how the chemical in question reacts with milk, with the milk to be safely discarded later -- and then, immediately after the first robot leaves, to order another robot to go to the kitchen, get the milk, and serve it to the murder victim -- which it unhesitatingly does because to the best of the second robot's knowledge, its just an ordinary glass of milk.
== Live-Action TV ==
| |||