Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel

[Madner Kami]

The Three Laws have flaws subtle or glaring if taken as absolutes, even within a hierarchy. Would robots do something that would cause some psychological harm to the 8 billion on their Earth if it would prevent hundreds of quadrillions of deaths and end human suffering in around a century? Especially if those 8 billion could still live out their lives to the end?

Something like put drugs in the water, food, or medical treatments to sterilize those 8 billion? It just seems so logical. You can even make the current population somewhat happy again, with the right chemicals.

I don't know how you would think genocide would ever be a logical step in any discussion.

And yet the robots conciously decide that slowly radioactively poisoning the Earth to force humanity out into space is a sound judgement, writing the Zeroeth Law in the process. And it is a question that has to be answered: Can the need of the many outweight the needs of the few and how should the needs of the few be weighted when the many is humanity itself?

Honestly people being frustrated by robots doing stuff is the least believable part of the books. There are people who give treats to roombas in the real world. Why in gods name would robots be seen as alienating?

There was a period in ancient Rome, where gangs of romans were out to kill slaves, because Rome was drowning in slaves and no roman could find paid work anymore. Do you remember the Luddites and Saboteurs, the people who smashed spinning machines because those machines put them out of their work? Have a look around you, where the increasing mechanization allows for a single farmer to tend to acres of land all on his own, where entire factories are managed by a single human being, where cars are at the beginning of driving all on their own (albeit trucks already being automated to an almost 100% degree), all the while planes are technically already fully automated and the pilot is a legacy device, just as much as in trains. It isn't hard to connect the dots. When your very survival depends on your work and your work is being done by someone or something that you just can not feasibly compete with, be it in terms of costs or efficiency, then what are you going to do? Roll up and die in the corner? Or do you smash the machine?

[MithrandirOlorin]

That's why we need to fix society so that Work is a necessity anymore, withing like a Basic Income.

The problem is America has come to view Hard work simply for Hard work's sake as a fundamental moral value. And I find that disgusting.

[Alinis]

The Three Laws have flaws subtle or glaring if taken as absolutes, even within a hierarchy. Would robots do something that would cause some psychological harm to the 8 billion on their Earth if it would prevent hundreds of quadrillions of deaths and end human suffering in around a century? Especially if those 8 billion could still live out their lives to the end?

Something like put drugs in the water, food, or medical treatments to sterilize those 8 billion? It just seems so logical. You can even make the current population somewhat happy again, with the right chemicals.

I don't know how you would think genocide would ever be a logical step in any discussion.

And yet the robots conciously decide that slowly radioactively poisoning the Earth to force humanity out into space is a sound judgement, writing the Zeroeth Law in the process. And it is a question that has to be answered: Can the need of the many outweight the needs of the few and how should the needs of the few be weighted when the many is humanity itself?

Honestly people being frustrated by robots doing stuff is the least believable part of the books. There are people who give treats to roombas in the real world. Why in gods name would robots be seen as alienating?

There was a period in ancient Rome, where gangs of romans were out to kill slaves, because Rome was drowning in slaves and no roman could find paid work anymore. Do you remember the Luddites and Saboteurs, the people who smashed spinning machines because those machines put them out of their work? Have a look around you, where the increasing mechanization allows for a single farmer to tend to acres of land all on his own, where entire factories are managed by a single human being, where cars are at the beginning of driving all on their own (albeit trucks already being automated to an almost 100% degree), all the while planes are technically already fully automated and the pilot is a legacy device, just as much as in trains. It isn't hard to connect the dots. When your very survival depends on your work and your work is being done by someone or something that you just can not feasibly compete with, be it in terms of costs or efficiency, then what are you going to do? Roll up and die in the corner? Or do you smash the machine?

Admittedly with the Luddites though a lot of the anger came from not from being put out of work, many of them were in fact employed but were extremely angry about being made to harder and in more dangerous conditions to produce what they viewed as a inferior product while getting vastly less pay than they had been getting before when they had been considered skilled laborers.

Which is admittedly why Queen Elisabeth the first and her successors had banned many of the machines that came to be used in the early industrial revolution because they felt it would make beggars of skilled craftsmen though by the time of the Luddite uprisings those businesses had begin ignoring those laws and they were then taken off the works along with many of the earlier laws protecting workers.

[TheLibrarian]

Say what now? Heinlein still seems to have a pretty good following. And while I admittedly have only read "Starship Troopers," I would say it still "holds up," at least in my opinion, even if it is a bit dated. Of course I'm one of those weird people who happens to like both the book and the movie, even though the movie and its maker totally bash on the book.

He does, but these days it seems to be mostly fans of his politics rather than fans of his writing, which mostly amounts to flogging the Holy Trinity of Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Stranger in a Strange Land as some kind of scripture.

Anyway, I wasn't try to imply Asimov was better known or regarded in the popular consciousness today--thus far Heinlein's film adaptations are better than Asimov's--just how their works feel to me in 2018. Heinlein is so defined by his mid-20th century viewpoint the farther we get from it the less relevant he feels, and because so often his works are in service to ideology first and narrative second, the storytelling suffers. Most of Heinlein's best ideas have been done better by later writers or adapters because his long-winded diatribes tend to kill the pacing of his stories.

The Asimov I've read on the other hand, is often taking an established narrative structure like murder mystery or Decline and Fall to explore Big Ideas, and isn't fixated on answers so much as questions. His characters tend to be shallower, and his world-building more broad strokes, but that works in favour of his longevity--being more archetypal, they feel more timeless than Heinlein's perpetual 1950s. To be fair there are recurring themes in Asimov that annoy me, but because the underlying stories tend to be solid and well-paced, I can still enjoy them.

[Yukaphile]

I just downloaded this and many Isaac Asimov novels, lol.

[Maximara]

The Three Laws have flaws subtle or glaring if taken as absolutes, even within a hierarchy. Would robots do something that would cause some psychological harm to the 8 billion on their Earth if it would prevent hundreds of quadrillions of deaths and end human suffering in around a century? Especially if those 8 billion could still live out their lives to the end?

Something like put drugs in the water, food, or medical treatments to sterilize those 8 billion? It just seems so logical. You can even make the current population somewhat happy again, with the right chemicals.

I don't know how you would think genocide would ever be a logical step in any discussion.

We also have psychological harm ie harm done to the mind not the body. There is a huge difference between a person having Robophobia and a robot going on a killing spree ala Doctor Who's "Robots of Death".

While I agree the sterilizing of the whole population would be ridiculous what about a partial sterilization where say 50% of the population was effected?

In my reading of Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, the laws seemed more like weighted potentials within their brains than hard-wired rules, so I don't have a problem with every robot not fleeing its owner, looking for humans to save or going into medical research. And Asimov did treat them as being sentient (not just sapient); I remember a scene where someone (Elijah Bailey, I think) has to let a robot wait on him, because the robot was suffering when told not to. You don't worry if your toaster is frustrated trying to get that perfect shade of brown.

The mincing, "I want to serve" thing was almost certainly put there by the spacers to make people "want" for the robots to do menial tasks. Honestly people being frustrated by robots doing stuff is the least believable part of the books. There are people who give treats to roombas in the real world. Why in gods name would robots be seen as alienating?

For those not totally familiar the Zeroth Law is 'A robot may not harm humanity, or through inaction allow humanity to come to harm'.

Jack Williamson's With Folded Hands (1947) and The Humanoids (1949) looks at what amounts to the Zeroth Law long before Asimov published "The Evitable Conflict" (1950) and that involved a generalization of the First Law rather then a Zeroth Law derived from a form of deductive reasoning.

[Darth Wedgius]

The Three Laws have flaws subtle or glaring if taken as absolutes, even within a hierarchy. Would robots do something that would cause some psychological harm to the 8 billion on their Earth if it would prevent hundreds of quadrillions of deaths and end human suffering in around a century? Especially if those 8 billion could still live out their lives to the end?

Something like put drugs in the water, food, or medical treatments to sterilize those 8 billion? It just seems so logical. You can even make the current population somewhat happy again, with the right chemicals.

I don't know how you would think genocide would ever be a logical step in any discussion.

We also have psychological harm ie harm done to the mind not the body. There is a huge difference between a person having Robophobia and a robot going on a killing spree ala Doctor Who's "Robots of Death".

While I agree the sterilizing of the whole population would be ridiculous what about a partial sterilization where say 50% of the population was effected?

I figured the psychological harm of each person being sterile (for those who find that troubling, of course) would be less important than all the future death and suffering (physical and psychological) of thousands of people -- that person's descendants.

If the First Law had been to maximize human happiness, this wouldn't apply. Or if a respect for individual liberty had been the First Law, because allowing people to choose to breed or not would override preventing humans coming to harm.

[AllanO]

But my subject today is how these laws are depicted in some stories. Because some writers seem to forget that the qualifiers on the second and third laws exist. For example, take the scene in The Forbidden Planet that KyleKallgrenBHH says demonstrates Asimov's three laws.

https://youtu.be/Za50E46Z87Y?t=361

For now I'll take Kyle at his word that that is the scene's intent. It bugs me that this near meltdown of Robbie happens, that meltdown would make sense if the three laws were treated as equal. But the qualifiers should guarantee that Robbie would simply not obey the command to kill and be fine.

Well remember positrons are anti-electrons, a positronic brain is powered by little twists of antimatter blowing up inside all the time (well apparently Asimov thought of them more as electrons but newer and sexier but still). Asimov at times seems to have imagined the positronic brain more in the style of an analog computer than a digital one in many cases. So the pull between the different laws was sometimes actual different physical forces coming to bare in the robot brain, so the depiction in Forbidden Planet is not that off base (however, just as often robot behaviour/cognition is about precise, discrete rule following though so it varies). It was definitely a feature of Asimov's robots that three law conflicts might lead to melt down of the positronic brain, but the more sophisticated the robot the less likely that was to happen. Labourer number 57 bot accidentally almost stepping on a small child when told to walk over there might have its brain melt because of the conflict between the laws, whereas a robot like R. Daneel could probably pull off some complicated moral calculus about saving ten people by killing one without damage, but in principle R. Daneel could in theory be lead into a three laws conflict/paradox verbally by a master roboticist and caused to self destruct despite all his paradox resistance crumple zones and robots did get destroyed by this sort of conflict from time to time in Asimov's stories.

Note if you switched the second and third law you could easily end up with a robot that would refuse to do any work lest it damage or risk its own safety in any way.

Asimov's robots tended to be humanoid more than they needed to be (like I think one of the I, Robot stories involved a robot that mostly helped doing calculations, but for some reason was a humanoid and so on), but I think even some positronic robots were explicitly not at all humanoid and even just disembodied postitronic brains for example.

It has been a long time since I read these books, but my thought is that Asimov's inquisitive scientists/ detective character on an investigation while a little formulaic (as I recall there are like five different characters that share a lot in common personality wise with Bailey in Asimov's ouevre) is I think Asimov's more engagingly written character type. They get to be clever, observant, solve a few puzzles, make some social commentary and otherwise add some colour to the setting and are nicely emblematic of Asimov's apparent ideal of curiosity, independence and rational thinking.

[AlucardNoir]

Anyone else dreading the inevitable Empire "series" reviews that are to come now that he's finished with the Foundation and Robot series?

[Wargriffin]

I find it funny that Asimov and Roddenberry had the same fixation on a Jezebel Female in their works.