Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
Robots and love
akronnick:
The Three Laws are a poor substitute for morality.
As most of the stories concerning them demonstrate.
Mr_Rose:
Indeed I'm pretty sure Asimov devised the three laws, as they originally were, specifically so he could show how terrible they were as a substitute for actual moral thought.
akronnick:
And by extention, how poor legal systems are at getting people to be nice to each other.
DSL:
Yeah, legisating morality, and all that.
Later in life, Asimov would credit(blame?) editor John Campbell with the Three Laws; by the time Asimov had interwoven his Robot Stories timeline with that of his Empire/Foundation stories, he felt the need for a Zeroth Law, by which a robot had to consider the good of humanity as a whole ("the needs of the many" if you prefer) over the good of any one human being. IIRC, he had it so that a robot character helped come up with the Zeroth Law.
Depending on your philosophy/politics, Zeroth Law opens up entirely new cans of worms.
Is it cold in here?:
Humans have managed to do terrible things both under rule-based systems and under moral-thinking-based systems.
QC robots like us, but can they understand us well enough to treat us with empathy when they've never had a human life?
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