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.
Philip K. Dick wrote a short story from the dog's pov about living in a home and thinking about the trash can. According to the dog the humans were doing what they were supposed to do, burying excess food for when they are hungry later. The clever humans had a metal box for it. And twice a week the dog would be furious at the mean men who took the box of yummy food away. The dog couldn't understand why the humans who were normally so clever didn't stop the mean people from taking away the food.
He mentioned the story a great deal not because he thought it was well written but because he was of the opinion that he was the dog. He sees visions of the possible future and understands them from his pov then writes it down.