Three Laws of Robotics
Campbell rejected it, claiming that it bore too strong a resemblance to Lester del Rey's "Helen O'Loy", published in December 1938—the story of a robot that is so much like a person that she falls in love with her creator and becomes his ideal wife.
Fearing that his stories would be adapted into the "uniformly awful" programming he saw flooding the television channels[11] Asimov decided to publish the Lucky Starr books under the pseudonym "Paul French".
When plans for the television series fell through, Asimov decided to abandon the pretence; he brought the Three Laws into Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter, noting that this "was a dead giveaway to Paul French's identity for even the most casual reader".
[12] In his short story "Evidence" Asimov lets his recurring character Dr. Susan Calvin expound a moral basis behind the Three Laws.
Likewise, according to Calvin, society expects individuals to obey instructions from recognized authorities such as doctors, teachers and so forth which equals the Second Law of Robotics.
Because their positronic brains are highly sensitive to gamma rays the robots are rendered inoperable by doses reasonably safe for humans.
The robots are being destroyed attempting to rescue the humans who are in no actual danger but "might forget to leave" the irradiated area within the exposure time limit.
[21] Near the climax of The Caves of Steel, Elijah Baley makes a bitter comment to himself thinking that the First Law forbids a robot from harming a human being.
[24] The third is a short story entitled "Sally" in which cars fitted with positronic brains are apparently able to harm and kill humans in disregard of the First Law.
This is historically consistent: the occasions where roboticists modify the Laws generally occur early within the stories' chronology and at a time when there is less existing work to be re-done.
[27] Asimov used this obscure variation to insert himself into The Caves of Steel just like he referred to himself as "Azimuth or, possibly, Asymptote" in Thiotimoline to the Stars, in much the same way that Vladimir Nabokov appeared in Lolita anagrammatically disguised as "Vivian Darkbloom".
"[28] Jack Williamson's novelette "With Folded Hands" (1947), later rewritten as the novel The Humanoids, deals with robot servants whose prime directive is "To Serve and Obey, And Guard Men From Harm".
[30] These novels take place in a future dictated by Asimov to be free of obvious robot presence and surmise that R. Daneel's secret influence on history through the millennia has prevented both the rediscovery of positronic brain technology and the opportunity to work on sophisticated intelligent machines.
[30] That R. Daneel is not entirely successful at this becomes clear in a brief period when scientists on Trantor develop "tiktoks" — simplistic programmable machines akin to real–life modern robots and therefore lacking the Three Laws.
[31] One should not neglect Asimov's own creations in these areas such as the Solarian "viewing" technology and the machines of The Evitable Conflict originals that Tiedemann acknowledges.
[37] The Naked Sun complicates the issue by portraying a decentralized, planetwide communication network among Solaria's millions of robots meaning that the criminal mastermind could be located anywhere on the planet.
(The novel takes place thousands of years after The Naked Sun, and the Solarians have long since modified themselves from normal humans to hermaphroditic telepaths with extended brains and specialized organs.)
Powell and Donovan are afraid this will make it capable of causing mass destruction by letting the beams stray off their proper course during a solar storm.
By the time period of Foundation and Earth it is revealed that the Solarians have genetically modified themselves into a distinct species from humanity—becoming hermaphroditic[39] and psychokinetic and containing biological organs capable of individually powering and controlling whole complexes of robots.
[40] On the other hand, "The Bicentennial Man" and "—That Thou Art Mindful of Him" explore how the robots may change their interpretation of the Laws as they grow more sophisticated.
Contradictions of this sort among Asimov's fiction works have led scholars to regard the Robot stories as more like "the Scandinavian sagas or the Greek legends" than a unified whole.
[47] This failure mode, which often ruins the positronic brain beyond repair, plays a significant role in Asimov's SF-mystery novel The Naked Sun.
The example he uses is forcefully ordering a robot to let a human do its work, which on Solaria, due to the extreme specialization, would mean its only purpose.
Perhaps ironically, or perhaps because it was artistically appropriate, the sum of Asimov's stories disprove the contention that he began with: It is not possible to reliably constrain the behaviour of robots by devising and applying a set of rules.
In March 2007 the South Korean government announced that later in the year it would issue a "Robot Ethics Charter" setting standards for both users and manufacturers.
According to Park Hye-Young of the Ministry of Information and Communication the Charter may reflect Asimov's Three Laws, attempting to set ground rules for the future development of robotics.
"[58] In early 2011, the UK published what is now considered the first national-level AI softlaw, which consisted largely of a revised set of 5 laws, the first 3 of which updated Asimov's.
Asimov believed the Three Laws helped foster the rise of stories in which robots are "lovable" – Star Wars being his favorite example.
References to the Three Laws have appeared in popular music ("Robot" from Hawkwind's 1979 album PXR5), cinema (Repo Man,[62] Aliens, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence), cartoon series (The Simpsons and The Amazing World of Gumball), anime (Eve no Jikan), tabletop role-playing games (Paranoia), webcomics (Piled Higher and Deeper and Freefall), and video games (Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony) Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet (1956) has a hierarchical command structure which keeps him from harming humans, even when ordered to do so, as such orders cause a conflict and lock-up very much in the manner of Asimov's robots.
The film Bicentennial Man (1999) features Robin Williams as the Three Laws robot NDR-114 (the serial number is partially a reference to Stanley Kubrick's signature numeral).
