The Laws of Robotics

Saturday, October 01, 2022

Tesla has announced a humanoid robot. As part of the reveal:

For safety reasons, the robots will include an external mechanism so people can stop them, Musk said, and that override mechanism won’t be updatable over the internet. In the longer run, for safety reasons, the robots likely will be “governed by some laws of robotics that you cannot overcome, like not doing harm to others,” [Tesla CEO Elon] Musk said, a reference to the three laws of robotics from science fiction author Isaac Asimov.

Every time some company comes out with a new robot, Asimov’s three laws get trotted out. I haven’t read those stories in a while, but I do seem to recall that more or less the whole point of them is that those “three laws of robotics” are not actually sufficient.