Comment by gpm
4 days ago
So first off, Asimov's entire point was these laws don't work. But also the entire setup of the trolley problem means that the robots only option is to violate 1. by either pulling or not-pulling the lever (though the server case is different - at least in the philosophical interpretation - I can easily see Asimov justifying it by saying that destroying the train-control-robot is going to cause a lot of human beings to come to harm).
> So first off, Asimov's entire point was these laws don't work.
Don't always work in all scenarios, was the takeaway.
There's a metric ton of salt to be taken with the mental concepts and possible interpretations of such "laws".
Largely, they do work in the stories, despite the inherent ambiguity.
I don't know how you could come to that point of view. His point is that there will always be a loophole. There does not exist a set of rules that make a completely safe and useful robot.
The stories are a series of logic puzzles. One of the points was that applying broad, simple rules, does not mean the problem is simple. Note, in the stories, the majority of robots are not considered so useless/dangerous to remove positronic robots from the fictional future society (I read a lot of the stories).
> There does not exist a set of rules that make a completely safe and useful robot.
That was not demonstrated. We have safe and useful robots, for some values of 'safe' and 'useful', today. Again, most of the robots in the stories are not thrown (or planned to be thrown) in the metaphorical trash heap.
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The ambiguity is the stories!
>Asimov's entire point was these laws don't work
Was it? I haven't read the short stories in some times, but I remember the case in which they don't work always being treated like an extremely rare, newsworthy exception.