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Laws of Humanics - the Zero-th Law!
12 Nov 2002
Reproduced
from Asimov's Robots & Empire
IN 1942, Isaac Asimov came with three laws of Robotics.
The Three Laws of Robotics are:
1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through
inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must
obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders
would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its
own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with
the First or Second Law.
Subsequently a fourth
law was added, the the "Zeroth Law", which is:
robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow
humanity to come to harm.
The laws of robotics now
stood as:
0. robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction,
allow humanity to come to harm.
1. A robot may not injure a
human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to
harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings
except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection
does not conflict with the First or Second
Law.
The Laws are in that order, i.e., the
Zero-th law has precedence over first law and so forth
These
laws basically deal with security to humanity. In the context of the
violence and harm to humanity that we see in the current times, it
would be interesting to see if the these laws of robotics can be
modified to be applicable to humans.
If we just replace
humans with robots in the above statements, with minor modifications
we arrive at following laws:
0. A human may not injure humanity or, through
inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
1. A human may not
injure another human being, or, through inaction, allow another
human being to come to harm.
2. A human must obey the orders
given it by other human beings except where such orders would
conflict with the First Law.
3. A human must protect its own
existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the
First or Second Law.
The laws now appear to make
some sense, however, they would need modifications to become really
applicable to humans. Henceforth, we call them the ‘Laws of
Humanics’.
Analysis on each Law
The 0th law
states:
A human may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow
humanity to come to harm
Here the entity being
protected is ‘humanity’. Since this law is at a level higher than
the 1st law that deals with protection to ‘human being’, it implies
that protection to an individual human being can be overlooked in
order to protect the entire humanity. The 0th Law, though it does
make sense for many situations, has the potential to be misused and
can also be dangerous if misunderstood.
Faced with a choice
to either save thousand lives or a single life, one would always try
to save a thousand lives. The potential for misuse occurs when the
law is interpreted in the context of an ideology, cause or religion.
It is possible for a person or a group to conclude on the basis of
their understanding of their ideology, cause or religion that in the
larger interest of humanity ‘in the context of their belief’ it is
correct to cause harm to a few people, who they see as enemies.
Therefore, the suicide bombers of Palestine convinced themselves
that they were carrying out the self destructive violence for a
greater cause – ‘the Palestine State’. Similarly the individuals who
flew airplanes in to WTC must have somehow convinced themselves that
they were carrying out the Act for a greater cause, which by their
reasoning could have been for ‘Islam’ or ‘humanity’.
We see
that 0th law is already being applied. The greatest example is the
armed struggle advocated by communists till a few years back. The
armed struggle to cause violence and grab political power, for the
greater good of humanity as they saw it. The 0th law is being used
by individuals, groups and even nation states to justify violence on
groups of human beings. ‘Collateral damage’, a term often used
during the US action in Afghanistan is nothing but a term for 0th
law itself.
We, therefore, see that 0th law is not
necessarily preventing violence and has the potential to cause great
harm to humanity, if misunderstood.
0th law in its present
form cannot be
applied
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