{"id":886,"date":"2003-02-11T23:22:16","date_gmt":"2003-02-12T07:22:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2003\/02\/11\/886.html"},"modified":"2003-02-11T23:22:16","modified_gmt":"2003-02-12T07:22:16","slug":"robots-and-heroes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2003\/02\/11\/robots-and-heroes\/","title":{"rendered":"Robots and heroes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Asimov's First Law of Robotics states:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n\t<p>A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human\n\t\tbeing to come to harm.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Were there any Asimov stories in which a robot noticed that humans are coming\n\tto harm all the time, and that by not working full-time to (say) fight crime,\n\tit was through inaction allowing them to come to harm? (I know about the extrapolated\n\tzeroth law, but that's not really what I'm talking about. Not humanity as a\n\twhole; just a whole lot of individual humans.)<\/p>\n<p>It seems like the obvious next step is for all robots to become full-time\n\tsuperheroes.<\/p>\n<p>This morning when I thought of this, I was going to segue into discussion\n\tof that Law as applied\tto humans: the whole \"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.geocities.com\/everwild7\/noharm.html\">First,\n\tdo no harm<\/a>\" thing, for example, not to mention \"An it harm none, do as thou\n\twilt shall be the whole of the law.\" (Standard digression here: note that <span class=\"word-as-word\">an<\/span> is\n\tan archaic word meaning <span class=\"word-as-word\">if;<\/span> it doesn't mean <span class=\"word-as-word\">and.<\/span> Further\n\tcomplicated by <span class=\"word-as-word\">and<\/span> also having once meant <span class=\"word-as-word\">if.<\/span>)\n\tNot injuring people seems like a good idea to me; but while never allowing people\n\tto come to harm through one's own inaction seems like a good ideal, it may perhaps be a bit\n\timpractical in practice.<\/p>\n<p>But I'll leave further elaboration as an exercise to the reader. (That reader\n\tsure must get a lot of exercise.) Mostly, I just like the connection between robots\n\tand superheroes.<\/p>\n<p>If Asimov did cover that already, then never mind.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Asimov&#8217;s First Law of Robotics states: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robots","category-speculative-fiction"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}