Sfdebris.net

First things first: I always chuckle, when a Commodore appears on screen and is only commanding a singular ship, usually added by the Commodore outranking the Captain of the Hero-Ship, despite the Hero-Ship not being in the fleet or flotilla of the Commodore. Orion takes the cake and puts some icing on it, by making the Commodore the Commander of a glorified lorry.

So then, robots are only ever build as soldiers and workers? I mean, technically the intent I have in mind for certain types of robots does qualify as work in a certain way, but... you know...



Just saying... But yeah, there's more use for robots, other than worker or soldier. Technically most of those applications do qualify as work of some kind, but one doesn't generally think of it in that way. Office-workers, drivers, assistants of all types, heck, the Japanese are using robots in homes for elderies as both assistance and actual company for the inhabitants. Using them for daycare is also not out of the question, especially given that we already use robots as toys for children in various configurations. There are plenty of applications for robots beyond soldiering and (heavy) work.

Y'know, far be it for me to sit here and claim to be a greater storyteller than Asimov, but the 3 laws have been deconstructed so many times over the years that they are now overly simplistic to the extreme. It fits the simpler time I guess when Robby the Robot was hi-tech.

There is a scene in Robocop 2 that bugs me where the antagonist (a woman who is trying to replace Murphy with a second Robocop) replaces his four directives with a few hundred that contain such disgusting ideas as ''pick up litter''. Thing is though that those four directives alone effectively make Murphy an incredibly shitty cop. Yeah, he can kill people just fine, but if you want him to do literally anything else that a cop does? Forget it. You see this in Robocop 1 when he stops that robber in the convenience store by... smacking him into a shelf and leaving him there? No arrest? No handcuffs? Nothing?
But she was the villain so this was evil and not bang on the nose.

TL;DR - You ain't doing shit with only three laws.

The core of most of Asimov's robot-stories is the breaking, stretching and subversion of the three (actually four) laws. He was quite aware of their insufficenies, despite their outward appearence of universality and completeness.

And to be perfectly fair, Asimov's laws were created as an angry response to the trend of "robot as Frankenstein's Monster" stories that were popular at the time.

Thirdly, the English-language description was always described as merely an approximation of the actual logic designed into the positronic brains. Somewhere between the physical circuitry and the instruction set, as I understand it.

In fact, Asimov’s Liar! and The Evitable Conflict both address the same theme as this episodes - robots taking over for our own “good”.