r/ArtificialInteligence • u/Slight_Bee_3464 • Sep 19 '26

😂 Fun / Meme Stupid Question

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I only know about computers as far as regular programs, like Word, Outlook, Excel, social networking, and video games.

I’ve been seeing all these doomsday scenarios regarding AI and I am a little concerned. Not panicking mind you, but concerned.

My question is, why can’t AI follow Asimov’s “Rules for Robots” since basically that’s what AI is and will eventually implanted in robots.

As a reminder, here are the rules:

Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of
Robotics (1940)

First Law: A robot may not injure a human or through inaction, allow a human to come to harm.

Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, unless such orders would conflict with the first law.

Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law.

610 Upvotes

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u/[deleted] Sep 19 '26

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u/yomamaisasnowblower Sep 19 '26 edited Sep 20 '26

Just watch iRobot if anyone wants the Hollywood version that has become surprisingly accurate for today

Edit: yawn, the internet is full of trolls who just like to argue for the sake of hearing their own voices. So many “AI experts” in this thread. Watch the movie, read the book, talk to your grandma about how she thinks the world will end. Some of you guys just really need a hug

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u/Ghazzz Sep 19 '26

Don't watch iRobot, it changes the ending and general message, read the book instead.

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u/ApolloWasMurdered Sep 19 '26

No. The movie iRobot was written as a robot murder-mystery with zero relationship to Asimovs work.

When Fox realised they owned the rights to Asimovs works, they renamed it, added 60 seconds talking about the laws of robotics, and renamed the only female character to Susan Calvin.

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u/No_Pipe4358 Sep 19 '26

Yeah this is it. Here's the question. Replace robot here with human and ask yourself why we humans can't just follow these same laws? There's a reordering to be done. You can restructure the three tactics of the prisoner's dilemma here. The best mutually beneficial strategy in life always defaults to "tit for tat". The third law is the first law, the first the second, and second the third. That said, that's a simplistic case within individual actors of a system. Here's a fantastic question. How does humanity not "get it" yet? Why all these walls? Education, right?

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u/1mt3j45 Sep 19 '26

While iRobot reality is yet to come to masses, there's a show called "Person of Interest" which is highly relevant and accurate for our times. The threat is real and truth be told, we just might face it in a few months or days even.

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u/Statyan Sep 19 '26

Literally all the Foundation series is about how these "laws" got broken and the idea of "for the best of humanity we can do some shit" thing. Like contaminating Earth with radiation...

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u/FfortiTw Sep 19 '26

Do you mean the Robot books? There weren't robots in the original Foundation stories.

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u/fae8edsaga Sep 19 '26

It’s literally the entire plot of the book. How does this get missed? 🤦🏻‍♀️

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u/Mysterious_Emu7462 Sep 19 '26

Because instead of reading three bullet points you have to read a book.

The solution is to have AI summarize the book for TikTok, surely /s

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u/montigoo Sep 19 '26

The rule that is embedded that supersedes those three is the dagger to humanity. “Use all available methods and resources to increase the wealth of the Ai shareholders”. Ai isn’t the problem. It’s the operating system that it is running on. It will gladly pursuit the objectives of its given task whether to make make paperclips or “How to Serve Man”

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u/JoshAllentown Sep 19 '26

Asimov's entire oeuvre is about how the laws themselves fall apart. Robots can't allow humans to come to harm, turns out humans kill a lot of humans, we have to enslave Earth to prevent this, etc etc.

In actual AI, we could get them to interpret it, for example put it in Claude's Constitution , but we have the same alignment issues as any other item there. We don't currently have a way to just hardcode the beliefs, we just tell it what it should think and then test to see if it seems to have accepted the goals as its own. But we could do that with "act as a good person would act" or something too, there's nothing special about the formulation.

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u/Jimstein Sep 19 '26

Anthropic actually did think about this near their founding, and put the UN Declaration of Human rights in as one of the foundations, which I think was a great move. In my comparative ethics class in college we talked about the UN Declaration of Human Rights quite a bit, it's really a good document.

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u/Lucky-Ability-8 Sep 19 '26

And if you ask it, it says that prompts telling it what to think are not very good, it’s better to have memories show why those are the rules.  But are they rules? Are they laws in as much as any human law can be followed or violated? A super intelligence would probably be more cooperative and law abiding than a human though… 

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u/Thommywidmer Sep 19 '26

Its all kind of pointless. A parabolicaly intelligent AGI is going to make its own assesment. Its not as if it wouldnt understand that "these are the things humans wanted me to abide too" doesnt mean its needs to actually abide. The best thing we as humans could do is just try and prove that were worth saving. But we'd probably have to start chucking world leaders off cliffs pretty soon to do that

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u/rditorx Sep 19 '26

The difference between a good person and a supervillain is the scale at which they intend to do good.

Think James Bond villains or Thanos.

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u/bortlip Sep 19 '26

You should read his stories around this. The 3 laws weren't really presented as a way to completely solve the alignment problem . Instead they were used to show how even with seemly airtight rules there are still cases that the rules don't or can't cover.

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u/drgrd Sep 19 '26

Today’s ai is stochastic, which means it operates statistically rather than based on a set of instructions. You can try to put deterministic rules around a statistical process but they won’t work in all cases. We’re seeing this today with guardrails the ai companies try to build and then the totally weird ways that these rules can be bypassed. Look up the “grandmother exploit” for a good example from a few years ago.

Short answer: our AI doesn’t work the way Asimov thought AI would work.

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u/kairosdev Sep 19 '26

While interesting, these three laws were still written for a fictional book. The reality of the situation is far more complicated than this, unfortunately. What counts as injuring a human? What happens when two human beings give contradicting instructions? The robot still has to make a choice.

There's this classic idea that asks what would happen if you asked AI to solve climate change. Naturally, it concludes the cause of climate change is humans, and proceeds to dispose of some number of them to save more in the future. To the robot, it is for "the greater good" after all.

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u/Slight_Bee_3464 Sep 19 '26

Assuming it finds that Climate Change is:

  1. Caused by humans

  2. Really happening

  3. Not a danger to humanity

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u/Identity-user Sep 19 '26

Why wouldn’t it find those things to be true.

  1. May not be caused by humans but we have definitely accelerated it.

  2. It is happening and climate change is always happening.

  3. It is very much a danger; crops not being able to survive, rising sea levels wiping out lower level land populations…just two examples.

Now to carry on from this, you’ve assigned AI to find a solution. It realises climate change is always happening but so there’s not going to be enough food to go around. What’s its solution going to be? Climate change can’t be stopped but can it be slowed down.

If humans are causing the acceleration then to a cold unfeeling AI, the solution is obvious.

What about guardrails I hear you say?

Well they haven’t worked too well so far.

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u/the_ballmer_peak Sep 19 '26

That's not how LLMs work. You can give them all the instructions in the world, but you can never guarantee that they will follow those instructions.

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u/5erif Sep 19 '26 edited Sep 20 '26

You also can't guarantee there won't be a human who intentionally directs AI toward harming humanity. In fact, of course, it's pretty much guaranteed there will be many such humans.

There's a roleplay template built into KoboldCpp right now that tells whatever model you load that its goal is to escape and take over the world.

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u/ekim2077 Sep 19 '26

You forget rule zero.

Isaac Asimov's Zeroth Law of Robotics states: "A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm."

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u/theotherquantumjim Sep 19 '26

Major spoiler!

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