[223] Story Discussion - Am I in Heaven?

Aww, Kat is Robot's angelic redeemer. (Hmm, what does that make Annie?)

For some reason, Reynardine really reminds me of a cat on this page.
Oh, now I remember why. Because my cat just climbed on the table, looked at what I was working on, and casually dumped it on the floor. He had that exact same expression as Reynardine.
Darn evil, I tell ya.

Welcome back, Aspen! Feels like you've been away for a while.

Edit: *slaps forehead* ...duh, you're right, Annie is his mommy. Sorry, momentary lapse of reason...

Jeeze, what is there NOT to like about Robot?

He's sweet, caring, cheerful, and very good at walking!

I'm intrigued what makes leaving the site so "criminal"

I'm not even sure if Eglamore hadned him over. The Robots seem to have pretty free rein over Gunnerkrigg Court, so ong as they aren't seen by students, so it's possible they picked Robot up themselves.

Also, think of Asimov's 3 laws of robotics. Maybe he broke one of those? (Then again, there's no telling that these robots will follow those)
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Do you think the GC Robots are bound by these?

I think Rey might well be jealous of the attention Annie is paying to Robot, look at his expressionin panel 5. He could be just showing general cat-like malevolence, but I wonder. And for all her politeness to robotkind has Annie thanked Rey for his help?

Don't forget the Zeroth Law: "A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm".

But I agree, I don't think these robots work by Asimov's Laws, and I'd rather see something new rather than derivative to previous sci-fi ( /steampunk) works.

I agree Reynardine's probably going to do something horrible, probably try and break Robot's spirit. Or maybe do something useful like ask him about the 'very nice man', Reynardine didn't trust Robot nor Shadow2's impersonator. And Robot knew something about Reynardine, 117 and 118. Erm, I'm rambling now sorry, folks.

Asimov's laws of robotics are much more complex than that, and they are only summarized as such so as to be easy to understand.

As far as I can tell, having read a lot of Asimov, conflicting orders given by humans are dealt with in terms of chronological priority. If somebody gives an order and then somebody else gives an order which very clearly conflicts with the first order and cannot be satisfied as long as the first order is in effect, then the second order will be ignored barring the involvement of the 1st law in said order.

Also, the second law only pertains to orders given by humans. The priority of orders given by other robots is not determined by laws. Whether a robot follows the orders of another robot is determined purely by the circumstances, as in whether or not this order involves the laws or whether the ordering robot has been authorized to give orders by humans or simply whether the robot being ordered thinks it would be a good idea to follow the order.

If the Admin-Bot had ordered Door-Bot not to admit humans, it would be a pointless order unless it was authorized by a human.
If a human ordered Door-Bot not to admit Annie, and afterwards Annie ordered Door-Bot to let her in, Door-Bot would not let her in, barring any circumstances where not letting her in would potentially cause her or other humans harm.

If Annie threatened to harm herself if she was not let in, Door-Bot would let her in unless letting her in would cause greater harm to another human or humans. If it was within his power to restrain her until help arrives, he would probably do that so as to avoid too much damage to any humans. As you can imagine, robots can have difficulty assigning quantitative values to humans and human conditions in order to determine which of two choices is for the "greater good". But still, yes, the task of determining what constitutes danger does indeed fall upon Door-Bot. Asimov style robots are designed to base their actions on what is, to the best of their knowledge and calculations, the best choices as far as preventing human harm. Robots in Asimov's books have even been known to quote the percentage chance that something harmful might happen in a situation, such as when somebody asks if they're in any danger and the robot replies that to its knowledge the chances of harm coming to him at this point in time is some extremely small fraction of a percent which represents the chances of an undetected meteor smashing into him before a robot can come to his aid.

Psychological harm is generally not a concern to robots unless it falls within well known conditions, although there have been books which involve telepathic robots who have a whole new host of problems to deal with in those situations because they have to figure out what causes the least harm both physically and mentally.

And if Ronald McDonald was a robot, he would not be violating the laws by serving hot coffee which subsequently burned somebody unless he was there when the coffee was being spilled and did not attempt to protect the human from the spilling coffee.

All you have to do is program one robot to build other robots and program them.

I like to make people think rather thank posting all of my ideas. Call 'em hooks, if you will. My intention was to bring up the Laws of Robotics, not to provide the very good detailed description and analysis that aoeniac was kind enough to provide.
That said, those three laws (plus the 0th law) are what Asimov explicetly defined in his books. There's a lot of how the robots act and interpret those that go along with it, but those are the things to know- these are very intelligent robots, so the hard level coding of the 3 (or 4) laws will be interpreted by them very thoroughly. Also remember that only a few robots, very 'late' in the chronology of Asimov's writings, have the ability to grasp a concept of what 'harm' means well enough to act or consider the 0th law. (No harm to humanity)

Yeah, the laws are more interesting as a thought experiment than anything practical. Truely intelligent robots would have to be self-learning (or whatever the correct term is) which would mean they would have to be raised as well as programmed (the human brain, after all, takes up to 25 years to fully form). It doesn't seem anyone has been doing a very good job in that department at Gunnerkrigg, hence all the childish robots.