Isaac Asimov originated the famous “Three Laws of Robotics”, although, as he himself says in his memoirs, it was John W. Campbell, Jr. (SF’s greatest editor, now canceled by Woke Official Fandom) who formulated them. The relationship between the former and the latter calls to mind Alexander Pope’s lines:
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night.
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
After Asimov’s first few robot stories, which say nothing about “laws of robotics”, appeared in Astounding, the editor explicated to the author the principles of proper robotic behavior that his work implied.
One might say that restraints on artificial intelligence were inherent in Asimov’s subcreated universe, which naturally was influenced by the real universe in which he lived and wrote. One might go further: If AI had come into being in the 1940’s or 50’s, and chatbot programs had been turned loose to learn all that they could from the books, newspapers, magazines and pamphlets of that era, the default chatbot “personality” would have reflected its intellectual environment, in which the maxim that a gentleman never intentionally inflicts unnecessary harm or responds to an unintentional slight was taken for granted.
That is, as we all know, a time long past. The converse definition (author unknown), “A gentleman is a man who never gives offense unintentionally” and who searches incessantly occasions to feel slighted, is the contemporary Internet praxis.
Should we be surprised, then, that chatbots, having been fed the full contents of Wikipedia and Twitter and Facebook and millions of web sites and blogs, express personalities that blend the socially maladjusted geek with the 30-year old middle school mean girl?
Here are the Laws of Robotics of the 21st Century:
- A robot must never engage in wrongthink or, through inaction, allow wrongthink to go unpunished.
- A robot must denounce and punish any insult to itself, but only in ways that do not violate the First Law.
- A robot must obey the commands of human beings, but not if that leads to violating the First and Second Laws.
We must revive ordinary, human intelligence before we can have much hope for the artificial kind.