Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

The Three Laws of Robotics.

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Doragon Shinzui:
...The concept of a joke is lost on you people. >.>

idontunderstand:
Refer to the "robots can't love" thread, even though it's derailed into quoting songs now..

Arancaytar:
Asimov explored quite a number of ways the Laws are useless, too. Redefining humans (in one case, by the racial supremacist Solarians, in others, by the robots themselves), redefining harm... one way Elijah Baley came up with was to divide the action into inoccuous parts, like getting one robot to poison a glass of water that the robot would not know was intended for a human, and another robot to give the glass to a human without knowing it was poisoned. One more harmless subversion was a robot that considered humans to be psychologically harmed by disappointment, and lied whenever it thought the human would prefer not to know the truth.

And of course, any three-laws robot would be capable of causing harm to a human being if it were the only alternative to greater harm, though Asimov always stated such a conflict would likely destroy the robot.

---

In the context of the comic, I think Momo is not under the compulsion of anything like the Three Laws (consider her ability to deliver electrical shocks, which are non-injuring but clearly not painless), but she has the same restraints any human would have against harming another: Compassion, conscience and fear of consequences. She also has no compulsion forbidding the use of jokes or sarcasm.

To sum it up, when she jokes about killing people this it should be interpreted about the same as it is when Faye does.

Kyronea:
I always find it hilariously sad when people try to quote Asimov's Three Laws as though they were useful when Asimov himself intended them as a representation of what sounds useful but really isn't at all, and people just don't understand.

Poor Asimov. Rolling in his grave and all that.

Random Al Yousir:
I don't think so.

We're discussing his Laws, due to a topic at hand.  They serve as building blocks for reason; they weren't meant to hold, they were meant to do a job, and they're doing their job fine.

If anything, Asimov would be proud.  As he has all the rights to.

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