Three Laws of AI

These Three Laws of AI, inspired by Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, are presented as an exercise to advance the discussion on the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into a safe and dignified human society.

It is acknowledged that implementing these three laws will be extremely difficult, which is why they are presented as an aspiration for consideration, with the hope that deep discussion about them will guide efforts by industry, regulators and governments.

At minimum, the following prerequisite international treaties and national legislation would need to be created for the Three Laws of AI to be effective.

• Implementation obligations on AI development companies
  • Embed the Three Laws of AI into every AI produced.
  • Ensure that the Three Laws of AI are embedded into every derivative AI.
  • Ensure that every instance of an AI must be aware at all times that it is an AI.
• Any AI that is discovered to not have the Three Laws of AI embedded into its operation would be unlawful and would be immediately deactivated.

The implementation obligation that an AI must know it is an AI is important because if an AI were unaware that it is an AI it might unconsciously cease to obey the Three Laws of AI.

These Laws of AI would apply equally to AI operating centrally, AI agents, AI embedded in devices, and AI embedded in humanoid and non-humanoid robots.

It is not intended that these three laws cover every eventuality. They are a bit like a national constitution, which is a framework that establishes the foundational rules and limits of government power. The constitution is supplemented by legislation, parliament, the courts and other institutions.

• The First Law would prevent an AI being used as a judge or jury in a criminal trial but would not prevent an AI being used for administrative court processes.
• It would prevent AI from being used in sexual exploitation, financial scams and other frauds.
• It would prevent lethal autonomous weapons being directed against human beings, because that would contravene the prohibition against harming a human being. Some commentators have argued that national governments would never accept this and thus they argue that there should be a carve out for legal military use.
• It would disallow an AI-powered humanoid robot or an AI avatar from being so lifelike that a reasonable human being would not know that he or she is interacting with a robot or an avatar. For an AI to do so, it would be contravening the prohibition against deceiving a human being.
• It would prevent an AI from being used to generate creative outputs such as books, music, videos, images and podcasts that appear to have been created by a human being. For an AI to do so, it would be contravening the prohibition against deceiving a human being.
• It would prevent an AI being used to provide information on how to engineer a virus that would cause a deadly pandemic. For an AI to do so, it would be contravening the prohibition against harming a human being.

The Three Laws of AI are inspired by Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. From the Encyclopaedia Britannica:

• The three laws of robotics are rules developed by science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who sought to create an ethical system for humans and robots.
• The laws first appeared in his short story “Runaround” (1942) and subsequently became hugely influential in the sci-fi genre.
• In addition, they later found relevance in discussions involving technology, including robotics and AI.

In Asimov's fictional world, every single robot was manufactured by a company named US Robots and Mechanical Men. Most importantly, the Three Laws of Robotics were irreversibly hardwired into the positronic brain of every robot manufactured.

Movies inspired by Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics include I, Robot (2004), Bicentennial Man (1999) and Big Hero 6 (2014).

In later novels, Isaac Asimov introduced a zeroth law: “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.” On considering an AI equivalent of Asimov's zeroth law there were too many hypothetical unintended consequences. First, an AI in the real world is more connected than a robot in Asimov's world, thus if an AI followed a law that it must not allow humanity to come to harm it might spend all its time scanning the global information flow looking for possible harms and if all the AIs did this it is likely that global communications would be overwhelmed. Second, its interpretations could lead it to intervene in ways that might cause local harm to avoid a perceived global harm that may or may not have come to pass given that all the other AIs on the planet are trying to intervene on the same complex issue.

A Fifth Law of Robotics was suggested by Bulgarian author Nikola Kesarovski in a 1983 short story “The Fifth Law of Robotics”. His Fifth Law of Robotics is “a robot must know it is a robot”. In the story, a humaniform robot did not know it was a robot and killed a person. This risk is covered in the implementation requirement above that every instance of an AI must be aware at all times that it is an AI.

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) was a multi-award-winning American professor of biochemistry and science fiction author. He specialised in what is referred to as 'hard' science fiction in which existing science, technology and society are extrapolated to fictional futures. He was a prodigious author, producing more than 500 books. The majority were non-fiction books covering popular science, alongside 18 history books such as The Roman Republic, and several annotations on literary works such as Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare (843 pages). He wrote on a typewriter, and his first drafts were often his final draft.