He’s rolling over in his grave, you know.

In 1942 Isaac Asimov first published his Laws of Robotics, which simply state that:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm;
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; and
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Poor Mr. Asimov. A brilliant, brilliant man, but he had his shortcomings. Constantly peppering his work with ponderings on “morals” and “ethics”, Mr. Asimov seems to have missed the boat completely. Robots, after all, are meant to make life cost effective and efficient. We humans will stop at nothing to achieve this and we won’t let a pesky thing like “social responsibility” get in our way, best evidenced through the U.S. Army’s use of Robot Soldiers in Iraq.

These little “bots, armed with M249 machine guns, are designed to patrol the streets of Iraq and, when given orders from a human controller, can “attack the enemy with relatively little risk to the lives of US soldiers”. There are currently only three robots deployed in Iraq, with the possibility of more to come. While expensive to engineer (about $200,000.00 USD/unit) they are far cheaper than the cost of recruiting, training, housing, clothing, and maintaining humans. Another plus side, according to officials, is that robots don”t require “a pension”, and they’re perfectly happy spending their non-working hours “mothballed in a warehouse”, unlike those demanding humans.

So there you go. I really can’t fathom anything else that so blatantly defiles Mr. Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. And once you have contradicted Laws 1 and 2, well… everything else goes up in flames. At that point, does the third law even matter?

In his writings, Carl Sagan often writes that technology, though essential, has the potential to destroy us all. Although we humans are capable of achieving great things, our goals often get sidetracked and become dangerous when our bothersome emotions get in the way. It really is a pity. But then again, emotions are necessary, aren’t they? Because if you take that away from us well …

We’re nothing more than robots, then, aren’t we?

Gordon Worley would certainly agree. In his essay, Three Laws Unsafe, Worley argues that Asimov’s Laws of Robotics are “unethical” because they “make robots [into] slaves” and they “violate the robots’ free-wills”.

Silly me. And here I thought that robots were created for the sole purpose of being slaves. If Hollywood has taught me anything it’s that robots should not, under any circumstance, possess free will. Obviously this Worley bloke hasn’t seen The Matrix.

But there I go, complicating things again. It seems to me that’s just what us humans do. And that’s just what we’ll continue to do, over-complicate, create, and destroy, as we incessantly spin around the sun…

On this tiny little planet we call home.

Edit: I have omitted the Zeroth Law, Asimov’s fourth law, which states that “A robot may not injure humanity, or through inaction allow humanity to come to harm”. But that’s just opening up a whole other can of worms, isn’t it? war, humanity, sacrificing lives for the greater good… and the justifications that could be given for it all …argh. it’s giving me a headache just thinking about it.

Let’s just say, for the purposes of this article, that gun wielding robots are a bad idea.