A while back an acquaintance posed the following question in Linkedin:
“Why do you think these three laws for robots or AI failed for humans:
“The first law is that a robot shall not harm a human, or by inaction allow a human to come to harm.
The second law is that a robot shall obey any instruction given to it by a human,
and the
third law is that a robot shall avoid actions or situations that could cause it to come to harm itself.”
Harold (Steve) Hayden’s Comment:
Well, firstly, the above is not complete for laws 2 and 3, the complete/correct laws are:
“A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.”
Let’s not forget Asimov later added the “Zeroth Law,” above all the others – “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.”
WRT those laws “failing”, having been a S/W engineer for decades, it’s a formidable challenge to code such laws (as real “behavior”), even more of a challenge to “teach” (e.g. learning systems/technologies) those laws and “embedding”/coding such laws to produce appropriate behavior into ALL systems is (IMHO) BEYOND (or at least one heck of a challenge) our “state of the art” (and more importantly, just the plain old desire/requirement to implement those laws).
So, I would submit, they’ve not been coded into our systems, and therefore have not failed.
FYI, back in the 80’s as a “visiting research scientist” at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Intelligent Systems, I was co-host for a “Workshop on Programming Environments for Intelligent Systems”, and I gave each attendee an EEPROM which I had “programmed” to contain the three original laws (before Asimov’s “0th” one appeared) in ASCII format giving the 150+ attendees the challenge “figure out what’s in them”. Likely those chips live in drawers/landfills and nobody but me (and whoever reads this) will ever know they exist.
Was “Liked” by David Cay Johnston
https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-cay-johnston-a722934/?original_referer=https%3A%2F%2Fmail.yahoo.com%2F