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Old 01-11-2007, 04:52 AM
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mudshark mudshark is offline
Is he ever gonna hit Krazy Kat, or what?
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A requirement? No. They may not be preferable, or even practical, for that matter, but I think that the general notion of "laws of robotics" bears consideration.

Even though Asimov coined the word (in 1940, according to one dictionary), he would have been the first to point out that he himself was not a roboticist. He reasoned, though, that robots, beyond a certain level of sophistication, could not be programmed with every eventuality anticipated -- it was far too complicated -- and that they would need to have some set of rules for working out, independently, just what to do in an unforeseen circumstance. They needed to be able to think something through, and needed to know where the lines were... what was in-bounds and what was not.

His Three (or four) Laws of Robotics fulfilled a literary function. I think it likely that real roboticists will have to design in -- perhaps are beginning to do so already -- a comparable set of rules that, while they may bear little or no actual resemblance to Asimov's, will fulfill the practical equivalent of that function.
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