this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2024
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Asimov didn't design the three laws to make robots safe.
He designed them to make robots break in ways that'd make Powell and Donovan's lives miserable in particularly hilarious (for the reader, not the victims) ways.
(They weren't even designed for actual safety in-world; they were designed for the appearance of safety, to get people to buy robots despite the Frankenstein complex.)
I wish more people realized science fiction authors aren't even trying to make good predictions about the future, even if that's something they were good at. They're trying to make stories that people will enjoy reading and therefore that will sell well. Stories where nothing goes particularly wrong tend not to have a compelling plot, so they write about technology going awry so that there'll be something to write about. They insert scary stuff because people find reading about scary stuff to be fun.
There might actually be nothing bad about the Torment Nexus, and the classic sci-fi novel "Don't Create The Torment Nexus" was nonsense. We shouldn't be making policy decisions based off of that.