prog | (no subject)

A friend told me yesterday that the plot of the I, Robot movie will center on robots who break the Three Laws of Robotics (presumably within minutes of the concept being introduced to the audience) and go on killing sprees. And only wisecracking tough-as-nails Will Smith can stop them and so on.

I was like to cry. He said that he actually did cry, when he saw the movie's trailer. And he's going to go see it anyway, following some bizarre need to watch the ship going down, I suppose. I won't be joining him.

(Background: Asimov's robots, even malfuctioning or rogue ones, never ever ever never ever broke the Three Laws (please correct me if I'm wrong here), which prevented them from harming people, actively or passively. They made interesting characters because of this constraint (both in the sense of the limit on their behavior and in the constraint Asimov gave himself as their author), and a frequent plot device involved humans fearing robots because they couldn't believe that the Three Laws were as absolute and unbreakable as they actually were.)

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Well--the Three Laws have at this point grown beyond Asimov and I think may be taken seriously by AI researchers.

As for breaking the three laws: there was a story in which a robot had been specifically programmed to not obey the First Law, because it worked with humans under conditions that would appear to it to require self-destruction to save humans, even though the humans weren't in any real danger. Susan Calvin rigged up a complex scenario to pick out which one of a hundred robots didn't have the First Law.

But by and large, robots wantonly ignoring the laws is more an Alfred Bester thing. These aren't laws you can break, like "Thou shalt not murder"; these are laws like gravity.

And watching the interview with the director that's up at apple.com, it does seem that he understands that these laws cannot be changed, but that the stories often centered around robots who seemed to have found a way around them. I admit, the trailer, with its images of robot armies attacking humanity, are a little, er, counter-Asimov. But I have hope.

Let's hope together. The best possible outcome is that the movie will actually be good and in retrospect we'll all look like the people who were soiling themselves over Peter Parker's lack of mechanical webshooters two years ago. (The way things appear now, it's more comparable to replacing the webs with poisonous lasers, and Aunt May with Tom Arnold, and including a sarcastic talking-spider sidekick.)

I don't want to take the time right now to hunt down sources, so I will quote something that may be incorrect and give the link. I'm going to be rushing out of the condo soon.

" don't know if you've read the reason why, but here's the crux of it: FOX claims this is based on Isaac Asimov's book I, Robot, when in fact it was based on an original script called Hardwired, and was simply renamed and slightly altered to be able to take advantage of being associated with Asimov's book. "
from http://imdb.com/title/tt0343818/board/nest/8818701 (I think the idea of a boycott some people are suggesting is silly, but I am not planning on seeing the movie at this point. "Hulk may change Hulk's mind tomorrow.")