Post from Alan Brown:

I didn’t want to let April pass without commemorating the 20th anniversary of Isaac Asimov’s death. He is remembered for many things. His science fiction inspired both conservative Newt Gingrich and liberal Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, as well as George Devol, who built the first industrial robot, and Marvin Minsky, the pioneering founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Asimov wrote more than 500 books, and is more widely translated than Tolstoy, Dickens, Chekhov, or even Plato. He also believed to have coined the term “robotics” which appeared in the short story “Liar” in 1941.

As he recalled in an essay in 1980: “I did not know at the time that it was an invented term. The science of physics routinely uses the -ics suffix for various branches, as in mechanics, dynamics, electrostatics, hydraulics, and so on. I took it for granted that the study of robots was robotics.”

A year later, in 1942, in his story, “Rounaround,” Asimov introduced his Three Laws of Robotics. Perhaps you know them: [1] A robot must 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 those orders would conflict with the First Law; [3] A robot must protect its own existence, except where such protection would conflict with the First or Second Law.

These “laws” have taken on a life of their own. Asimov the scientist (he had a Ph.D. in biochemistry) created them because any technological society would build safeguards into its machines, the same way Cuisinart food processors cannot slice unless the cover is on. Asimov the writer then spent 20 years writing stories about the way safeguards could fail.

Today, robots are growing increasingly autonomous. Some predict that true intelligence is not so far away. In fact, this week, the University of Miami Law School is hosting a conference on the legal and policy aspects of increasingly capable robots.

And so, 20 years after his death, Asimov’s three laws have become the starting point for any discussion of how robots should behave in our society. It is a brilliant legacy for a young man who dreamed something new.