Killer robots - against the law?
In Flipside 32 David Hambling examines the threat from a new breed of military killer robots, and gives some tips on how best to take them out. Here he considers how Isaac Asimov’s famous Laws of Robotics might apply to mechanical soldiers.
 In early science fiction stories, robots always seemed to go down the same path as Frankenstein's monster: "scientist creates robot, robot gets out of control and kills scientist".
This didn’t leave much room to explore other possibilities, like what would happen when robots did all the work, or if robots would ever be more like people than machines. To make SF more interesting – and to prevent people from always seeing robots as villains - in 1940 Science Fiction writer Isaac Asimov invented the Three Laws of Robotics, starting with The First Law:
"A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."
(The other two laws say that robots have to obey humans and that they need to protect themselves, as long as these do not clash with the First Law.)
Asimov himself wrote many stories about robots – including ‘I, Robot’ which was filmed with Will Smith – involving cases where it looked like the Laws had been broken. It invariably turned out that there was more going on, like someone trying to frame a robot for a murder. Other writers followed his lead, and from always being a threat, robots in science fiction branched out into being helpful assistants, sidekicks and even comic relief, like R2-D2 and C-3PO in Star Wars.
Could this idea from SF be applied to the real world? Could we get rid of any risk of killer robots simply by making sure that they are all programmed with Asimov's Three Laws?
Roger Clarke, Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy has studied the problems of actually getting robots to obey Asimov's laws, and unfortunately it's not that easy.
‘It is not possible to reliably constrain the behaviour of robots by devising and applying a set of rules,’ says Prof Clarke.
For example, the First Law says a robot must not ‘allow a human being to come to any harm.’ That means that robots would be forced to stop people from doing anything which might be dangerous – like skateboarding, or smoking, or getting on a plane. This would get very impractical.
 Also, in Asimov's universe there are no military robots. At present, the CIA use unmanned Predator and Reaper aircraft to carry out strikes on terrorists; more advanced robots will have more will of their own, but no conscience about killing. And the US will not be the only power using such robots – one day they may even be in the hands of terrorists. Killer robots are a real possibility.
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