Those Amazing Electronic Thinking Machines by Isaac Asimov

Coincidentally, 2015, the year “Runaround” is set in, is also turning out to be the year when a lot of humans are having Speedy conundrums of their own, torn by the promise of robots to help humankind and the seemingly more tangible worry that the very robots we are working so feverishly to create will get a little too smart, rise up, and wipe us all out. Markoff’s book arrives at an important moment in the humans-versus-robots debate. “The robotics community is less tortured by existential issues.” How close we are to that “someday,” and why it’s taking longer than Asimov and others thought it would, is the subject of Pulitzer Prize-winning “New York Times” journalist John Markoff’s Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots (Ecco, 2015). In hindsight, it was a gutsy move on Asimov’s part to introduce his Laws to readers by exposing their limitations, but that’s how it’s always been with humans and the robots we appear destined to someday live and work with. Above: Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics first appeared in a science-fiction magazine before being included in the 1950 book, “I, Robot.” Top: A robot built by Team HRP-2 of Tokyo at the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge. To find out how Powell and Donovan wrench Speedy back to robot reality, read the book. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.Īs it turns out, while attempting to perform the task assigned to him, Law 2, Speedy encounters a danger to his existence (in the story, Speedy has been given an enhanced sense of Law 3), prompting his subsequent chicken-with-its-head-cut-off behavior. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.ģ. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.Ģ.

In the future, Asimov imagined, all robots would be engineered with the following three mandates written into their source code:ġ. Speedy’s conundrum was the result of a flaw in Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, which the writer introduced to science-fiction fans in Speedy’s story, “Runaround,” first published in the March 1942 issue of “Astounding Science Fiction” and reprinted in 1950 as one of the nine tales in I, Robot. Unfortunately, Speedy has become confused by the conflicting protocols programmed into his “positronic” brain, so much so that he’s randomly quoting Gilbert & Sullivan and running around in circles. There, a couple of interplanetary miners named Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan are having trouble with a robot nicknamed Speedy, who’s been sent onto Mercury’s furnace-like surface to perform what should be a routine task. In the fall of 1941, with war raging in Europe and Russia, science-fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote a short story set in a far-distant future.

Those Amazing Electronic Thinking Machines by Isaac Asimov