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PEEL - The Futurama Message Board    General Futurama Forum Category    Re-Check/Weird Scenes    Issac asimov's three laws or whatever « previous next »
Author Topic: Issac asimov's three laws or whatever  (Read 4254 times)
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DanceCommander

Delivery Boy
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« Reply #40 on: 07-10-2003 12:23 »

 
Quote
Originally posted by Australian Guy:
Yes but kryten i all quit and helpful. Bender is a kleptomaniac with an in your face attitude.
I just thought it was odd trhat there are so many obscure references in futurama, but this one was excluded.

They are really to bo considered more like laws of physics and nature than legislative laws.

There was one episode of Red Dwarf "Tikka to Ride" where Kryten became very bender, not really caring about the laws of physics and causality, thatsort of thing. Pulling off lines like "Just call me Badass", and downing a bottle of Chinzano Bianco. Watch It!
aussie dude

Bending Unit
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« Reply #41 on: 07-10-2003 12:30 »

i dont think they should be considered firm laws  more like a friendly suggestion.
DanceCommander was that the episode where he mixed listers drink with his groinal attachment
DanceCommander

Delivery Boy
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« Reply #42 on: 07-14-2003 14:17 »

That is indeed the ep, aussie dude. I think Futurama lends alot from that episode.
reverend

Bending Unit
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« Reply #43 on: 07-16-2003 06:46 »

Also the episode "Kryten" where he makes his first appearance (though it isn't Robert Llewelyn behind the rubber mask) he ends up by painting a picture of Rimmer on the toilet and mimics a scene from Rebel Without a Cause or something. The last shot is Kryten dressed in black leather riding off on a motorbike.
Smon

Crustacean
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« Reply #44 on: 07-28-2003 23:20 »

Logical Reason:
Bender has a malfuctioning conscience circuit, and a working submission circuit.
Real Reason:
Bender breaks human laws so why not break robot laws?
payn
Bending Unit
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« Reply #45 on: 08-04-2003 05:01 »

 
Quote
Originally posted by reverend:
"Bite my shiny metal ass" wouldn't sound as good if he were human.


Anyway, Bender is a more believable robot than Asimov's robots. Building an intelligent mind up from rules has turned out to be much harder than anyone expected in the 1950's; it looks like the simplest way to do it is to take a complex neural network and train it to emulate a human. In which case there will be no way to enforce strict laws of robotics--or to avoid the same vices of humanity from appearing in our robots.

And it will probably work much better to do this through bootstrapping--painstaking years of work creates a first-level AI, which then creates the improved version, and so on. So humans may have very little of the direct control over robots that Asimov envisioned.

Of course a thousand years of neural network technology, chaos theory, and so on will probably change all of that (which is why Bender would jump off a bridge if he were programmed to...).

Most of the time, Bender is closer to a realistic robot for 2050 or even 2020, not 3000--but hey, destroy the world a few times and it tends to set back progress a little.

Asimov didn't suck, but you have to rememeber that he was writing before the computer industry--and before a decent interpretation of quantum physics, and before deconstructionism, and before futureshock, and so on--in short, before so many of the social and scientific ideas that we take for granted today. So we already know today that all of his ideas about the future were wrong, while we won't know for sure that, say, Sterling and Stephenson were wrong until maybe 2010. Does that make them better writers?

On the other hand, he did have a serious problem with female characters, other than the Margaret Thatcher type.
Gleno

Liquid Emperor
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« Reply #46 on: 08-17-2003 11:35 »

I love that episode so damn funny.... :D
Chump

Urban Legend
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« Reply #47 on: 08-17-2003 11:45 »

This reminds me of a Onion article... http://www.theonion.com/onion3015/robots_trying_to_kill_3015.html

Ro-bots!
Lionel Hutz Esq

Bending Unit
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« Reply #48 on: 08-19-2003 05:21 »

Asimov's Three Laws are not legal laws, but are supposed to be like natural laws (Newton's Laws of Motion,The Three Laws of Thermodynamics, etc.) that are as inviolable to robots as the law of gravity is to you or me.  The positronic brain of an Asimov robot is formed so that the robot could not undertake a thought or action that violated these laws.

Now, as Asimov was the first to say, he had no idea how this worked.  (He has discussed this in several of his essays in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; in answering why his robots had positronic brains, he said it sounded good).  But they were put in to the robots as a defense mechanism and to prevent people from being afraid of robots.  By the laws, robots had to be subservient.  As has been pointed out, they can lead to problems.  Such as what choices a robot has to make when carrying out the laws.  Asimov has dealt with these several times in both his essays and fiction.

To see an example of an Asimov robot, look at Data from STTNG.  Rodenberry was a big Asimov fan (as was Asimov of Rodenberry), and Data is basically what Asimov dreamt of (down to the positronic brain), and operated under the three laws. 

Another example is Robocop (who has a variation of the three laws, and in the second movie is nearly driven insane when they upload a couple hundred laws (such as "Always look both ways when crossing the street", and "Always say 'Thank you'" ).

All that being said, Bender, nor any of the other Futurama robots, were programmed with the three laws.  They lie at the other end of the Robot continum, that of annoying consumer goods.  Bender (and Mom's Friendly Robot Company) have a lot more in common with Douglas Adams' Sirius Cybernetcs Corp.  I always wondered if the robot coffee maker was a bit of an homage in "Mother's Day".
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