Isaac Asimov & Robotics
Ai Revolution
The world is currently entrenched in the thick of the Ai era, and our community has been experimenting since 2022 exploring commercial grade, customer-facing user interfaces that have first allowed us to make silly photos, engage in interesting conversations, then build resumes and business plans. Now we are deep in the web of video generation and what it means to be treading reality.
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)
About a month ago I encountered a couple of podcasts that encouraged me to listen to Isaac Asimov as reference for robotics and artificial intelligence. I have to say that I discovered a newfound love for this type of literature, as it straddles imagination and technology, being the forefront of robotics imagination in the modern era. But if I'm not mistaken, Isaac Asimov was one of the early adopters of the word “Robot” in literature. What is fascinating is how his words are still, if not more so, relevant today.
You can tell in his writing that he is creating rules, kind of like a robot, for robotics - in which he stresses his three laws of robotics quite often in his writing. The laws he created are following:
First Law: A robot cannot harm a human, or through inaction, allow a human to be harmed.
Second Law: A robot must obey human orders, unless they conflict with the First Law.
Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence, unless it conflicts with the First or Second Law.
These laws first appeared in his short story called “Runaround”. They lay the foundation of what robotics may look like in the future, how it will merge with humanity, and the potential thought process of robotics in respect to humanity. I found that his writing, through audiobooks at 2x speed, to be incredibly enjoyable, and I would consider him my third favorite author now after George Orwell and Douglas Adams.
For a few famous reference points in his work, I would recommend watching the following movies/shows that were based on his novels:
Bicentennial Man
I, Robot
Foundation (Apple TV+)
Ai Basics
First I would like to go through the things that I've learned from MIT, an online course that I explored in 2023.
First we're going to break down artificial intelligence into three sections:
Machine learning
Natural language processing
Robotics
In a future blog, we're going to give a very collegiate explanation as to what this all means and why it matters. As we dive deeper we will start integrating Isaac Asimov and why he is a forefather of this generation in terms of his creative literature. Lastly, we will end this blog with what is to come, what we should expect, and all the things that we can hope to see and what we need to guard against.
Here is a quote that was from the chapter “The Laws of Robotics” in the collection Robot Visions, in which I later sourced from Wikipedia for accuracy:
Asimov later wrote that he should not be praised for creating the Laws, because they are "obvious from the start, and everyone is aware of them subliminally. The Laws just never happened to be put into brief sentences until I managed to do the job. The Laws apply, as a matter of course, to every tool that human beings use",[13] and "analogues of the Laws are implicit in the design of almost all tools, robotic or not":[14]
Law 1: A tool must not be unsafe to use. Hammers have handles and screwdrivers have hilts to help increase grip. It is of course possible for a person to injure himself with one of these tools, but that injury would only be due to his incompetence, not the design of the tool.
Law 2: A tool must perform its function efficiently unless this would harm the user. This is the entire reason ground-fault circuit interrupters exist. Any running tool will have its power cut if a circuit senses that some current is not returning to the neutral wire, and hence might be flowing through the user. The safety of the user is paramount.
Law 3: A tool must remain intact during its use unless its destruction is required for its use or for safety. For example, Dremel disks are designed to be as tough as possible without breaking unless the job requires it to be spent. Furthermore, they are designed to break at a point before the shrapnel velocity could seriously injure someone (other than the eyes, though safety glasses should be worn at all times anyway).
