Manufactured Sentient Life

[Owen E Oulton]

Anyway, I think Asimov felt that, just as people have a little trouble adjusting to someone coming home from war (the nagging notion that "he's a killer"), it will be exaggerated in the case of robots, and people will never accept into their communities the same robots that were used for combat (nagging belief it may "go off" and kill people around it). The only way people would accept robots is if they were 100% no threat.

Actually, from statements Asimov made while still walking the Earth, he stated that in fact he thought the 3 Laws were in real life a pretty dumb idea - unworkable and unenforceable - and were created solely as a plot device for his stories, in which they frequently don't work. He grumbled that people just didn't get the point.

[C5]

I also heard that Asimov was fed up with stories of robots rebelling against their masters, which were the norm as far as robot stories went since Carel Capek invented the term, and created these laws to base stories on something else than robots battling humans.

It doesn't surprise me that he considered these laws unrealistic - for one thing, I always thought that "Not harming humans" must have required the builders to include a very detailed database in any robot's brain, to be able to decide what was supposed to harm a human or not (it's obvious a human will be harmed should he drown or be stabbed, but how about a guy wearing a pacemaker coming near a magnetic field, or someone who has been standing in the sun for some time falling into cold water, for instance ?)
Which could be a very dangerous things indeed, should a perverted individual manage to acess such database...

[Tricky]

The whole thing kinda reminds me of the Simpson's ep. where they go to Itchy&Scratchy Land and the robots start attacking their creators. Prof. Frink comes into the lab and says something like "According to chaos theory, all robots eventually turn agianst their creators....."

Makes you wonder why scientists in sci-fi create robots, super-soldiers and super intelligent computers: they all turn against their creators at some point.

Even when (or maybe especially when) they are "3 Laws Safe"!

[tonyg]

Makes you wonder why scientists in sci-fi create robots, super-soldiers and super intelligent computers: they all turn against their creators at some point.

Even when (or maybe especially when) they are "3 Laws Safe"!

For the same reason why people keep going into the holodeck, or use shuttlecraft-so it can all go horribly wrong for story purposes. If the Enterprise is any indication as to how things are going in the rest of the Federation, about the only bit of technology that would be in use would be the artifical gravity.