The movie "I, Robot" is a muddled affair. It relies on shoddy pseudo-science and a general sense of unease that artificial (non-carbon-based) intelligent life forms seem to provoke in us. But it goes no deeper than a comic book treatment of the important themes that it broaches. I, Robot is just another – and far inferior – entry in a long line of far superior films such as "Blade Runner" and "Artificial Intelligence."
Sigmund Freud said that we have an uncanny reaction to the inanimate. This is probably because we know that, pretensions and layers of philosophising aside, we are nothing but recursive, self-aware, introspective, conscious machines. Special machines, no doubt, but machines all the same.
Consider the James Bond movies. They constitute a decades-spanning gallery of human paranoia. Villains change: communists, neo-Nazis, and media moguls. But one kind of villain is a fixture in this psychodrama, in this parade of human phobias: the machine. James Bond always finds himself confronted with hideous, vicious, malicious machines and automata.
It was precisely to counter this wave of unease, even terror, irrational but all-pervasive, that Isaac Asimov, the late sci-fi writer (and scientist), invented the Three Laws of Robotics:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given to 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 Laws.
Many have noticed the lack of consistency and, therefore, the applicability of these laws when considered together.
First, they are not derived from any coherent worldview or background. To be properly implemented and to avoid their interpretation in a potentially dangerous manner, the robots in which they are embedded must be equipped with reasonably comprehensive models of the physical universe and of human society.
Without such contexts, these laws soon lead to intractable paradoxes (experienced as a nervous breakdown by one of Asimov’s robots). Conflicts are ruinous in automata based on recursive functions (Turing machines), as all robots are. Godel pointed to one such self-destructive paradox in the "Principia Mathematica", ostensibly a comprehensive and self-consistent logical system. It was enough to discredit the whole magnificent edifice constructed by Russell and Whitehead over a decade.
Some argue against this and say that robots need not be automata in the classical, Church-Turing, sense. That they could act according to heuristics or probabilistic rules of decision-making They remind us that there are many other types of functions (non-recursive) that can be incorporated into a robot.
True, but then, how can one guarantee that the robot’s behaviour is fully predictable? How can one be certain that robots will fully and always implement the three laws? Only recursive systems are predictable in principle, though, at times, their complexity makes it impossible.
This article deals with some commonsense, basic problems raised by the laws. The next article in this series analyses the laws from a few vantage points: philosophy, artificial intelligence, and some systems theories.
An immediate question springs to mind: how will a robot identify a human being? Surely, in a future of perfect androids constructed of organic materials, no superficial outer scanning will suffice. Structure and composition alone will not be sufficient differentiating factors. One way
to settle this very practical issue is to endow the robot with the ability to conduct a Converse Turing Test (to separate humans from other life forms) and the other is to somehow "barcode" all the robots by implanting some remotely readable signalling device inside them (such as an RFID – Radio Frequency ID chip). Both present additional difficulties.
The second solution will prevent the robot from positively identifying humans. He will be able to identify, with any certainty, robots and only robots (or humans with such implants). This ignores, for discussion’s sake, defects in manufacturing or loss of the implanted identification tags. And what if a robot were to get rid of its tag? Will this also be classified as a "defect in manufacturing"?
In any case, robots will be forced to make a binary choice. They will be compelled to classify one type of physical entity as a robot and all the others as "non-robots". Will non-robots include monkeys and parrots? Yes, unless the manufacturers equip the robots with digital, optical, or molecular representations of the human figure (masculine and feminine) in varying positions (standing, sitting, lying down). Or unless all humans are somehow tagged from birth.
These are cumbersome and repulsive solutions, and not very effective ones. No dictionary of human forms and positions is likely to be complete. There will always be the odd physical posture that the robot would find impossible to match to its library. A human disc thrower or swimmer may easily be classified as "non-human" by a robot – and so might amputated invalids.
What about administering a converse Turing Test?
This is even more seriously flawed. It is possible to design a test that robots will apply to distinguish artificial life forms from humans. But it will have to be non-intrusive and not involve overt and prolonged communication. The alternative is a protracted teletype session, with the human concealed behind a curtain, after which the robot will issue its verdict: whether the respondent is a human or a robot. This is unthinkable.
Moreover, the application of such a test will "humanize" the robot in many important respects. Humans identify other humans because they are human, too. This is called empathy. A robot will have to be somewhat human to recognise another human being. It takes one to know one, the saying (rightly) goes.
Let us assume that, in some miraculous way, the problem has been overcome and robots unfailingly identify humans. The next question pertains to the notion of "injury" (still in the First Law). Is it limited only to physical injury (the elimination of the physical continuity of human tissues or of the normal functioning of the human body)?
Should "injury" in the First Law encompass no less serious mental, verbal, and social injuries (after all, they are all known to have physical side effects which are, at times, no less severe than direct physical "injuries")? Is an insult an "injury"? What about being grossly impolite or psychologically abusive? Offending religious sensitivities, being politically incorrect – are these injuries? The bulk of human (and, therefore, inhuman) actions actually offend one human being or another, have the potential to do so, or seem to be doing so.
Consider having surgery, driving a car, or investing money in the stock exchange. These "innocuous" acts may end in a coma, an accident, or ruinous financial losses, respectively. Should a robot refuse to obey human instructions that may result in injury to the instruction-givers?
Consider a mountain climber—should a robot refuse to hand him his equipment lest he fall off a cliff in an unsuccessful bid to reach the peak? Should a robot refuse to obey human commands pertaining to the crossing of busy roads or to driving (dangerous) sports cars?
Which level of risk should trigger robotic refusal and even prophylactic intervention? At which stage of the interactive man-machine collaboration should it be activated? Should a robot refuse to fetch a ladder or a rope for someone who intends to commit suicide by hanging himself (that’s an easy one)?
Should he ignore an instruction to push his master off a cliff (definitely), help him climb the cliff (less assuredly so), drive him to the cliff (maybe so), help him get into his car in order to drive him to the cliff... Where does the money for responsibility and obeisance end?
Whatever the answer, one thing is clear: such a robot must be equipped with more than a rudimentary sense of judgment, with the ability to appraise and analyse complex situations, predict the future, and base his decisions on very fuzzy algorithms (no programmer can foresee all possible circumstances). To me, such a "robot" sounds much more dangerous (and humanoid) than any recursive automaton that does not include the famous Three Laws.
Moreover, what exactly constitutes "inaction"? How can we set apart inaction from failed action or, worse, from an action that failed by design, intentionally? If a human is in danger and the robot tries to save him and fails, how could we determine to what extent it exerted itself and did everything it could?
How much of the responsibility for a robot’s inaction, partial action, or failed action should be imputed to the manufacturer, and how much to the robot itself? When a robot finally decides to ignore its own programming, how are we to gain information regarding this momentous event? Outside appearances can hardly be expected to help us distinguish a rebellious robot from a lackadaisical one.
The situation gets much more complicated when we consider states of conflict.
Imagine that a robot is obliged to harm one human in order to prevent him from hurting another. The laws are absolutely inadequate in this case. The robot should either establish an empirical hierarchy of injuries or an empirical hierarchy of humans. Should we, as humans, rely on robots or on their manufacturers (however wise, moral, and compassionate) to make this choice for us? Should we abide by their judgement on which injury is the more serious and warrants an intervention?
A summary of the Asimov Laws would give us the following "truth table":
A robot must obey human commands except if:
obeying them is likely to cause injury to a human, or obeying
them will let a human be injured.
A robot must protect its own existence with three exceptions:
That such self-protection is harmful to humans; that such self-protection entails inaction in the face of potential human harm; and that such self-protection leads to robot insubordination (failure to obey human commands).
Trying to create a truth table based on these conditions is the best way to demonstrate the problematic nature of Asimov’s idealised yet highly impractical world.
Here is an exercise:
Imagine a situation (consider the example below or one you make up) and then create a truth table based on the above five conditions. In such a truth table, "T" would stand for "compliance" and "F" for non-compliance.
Example:
A radioactivity monitoring robot malfunctions. If it self-destructs, its human operator might be injured. If it does not, its malfunction will equally seriously injure a patient dependent on its performance.
One of the possible solutions is, of course, to introduce gradations, a probability calculus, or a utility calculus. As they are phrased by Asimov, the rules and conditions are of a threshold nature, yes or no, take it or leave it. But if robots were to be instructed to maximise overall utility, many borderline cases would be resolved.
Still, even the introduction of heuristics, probability, and utility does not help us resolve the dilemma in the example above. Life is about inventing new rules on the fly, as we go, and as we encounter new challenges in a kaleidoscopically metamorphosing world. Robots with rigid instruction sets are ill-suited to cope with that.
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