What to do when your self-driving car decides to drive you to the police

Re:What to do when your self-driving car decides to drive yo... by taneq on Monday February 22, 2016 @09:48AM (#11151068)

Real robots will have their second and third laws swapped. Robots are expensive and humans are stupid. Robots will politely refuse any order which will damage them - for example, a self-driving car isn't going to drive into a wall even if it's empty and you order it to do so.

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Re:What to do when your self-driving car decides to drive yo... by daveloyall on Monday February 22, 2016 @12:37PM (#11152611)

SPOILERS FOR WORKS OF ASIMOV

Your suggestion was a plot point in one of Asimov's original robot stories!

There was a robot on some hot, unforgiving planet or moon.. Io? Mercury? Its duty was to perform some kind of mining, I forget.

It never encountered humans that were not co-workers (supervisors) and it was expensive...

So, the engineers tweaked the weight of the second and third laws so that it would tend to protect itself from the environment, even if a human carelessly ordered it to perform some work that it might not survive.

The story started when careless orders were indeed given. The robot began to "act drunk", as in it was wandering around singing. The recurring character "robot psychology expert guy" showed up to unravel the mystery (which I already spoiled in the previous paragraph).

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Re:What to do when your self-driving car decides to drive yo... by taneq on Monday February 22, 2016 @02:37PM (#11153612)

I believe the story you're referring to is called "Rabbit". They solved that one by forcing a situation which triggered the first law, breaking the deadlock. :)

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Re:What to do when your self-driving car decides to drive yo... by daveloyall on Monday February 22, 2016 @03:02PM (#11153813)

Hm, no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_That_Rabbit

Found the one I was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaround_%28story%29 It's interesting that I remember the story incorrectly.

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Re:What to do when your self-driving car decides to drive yo... by taneq on Monday February 22, 2016 @08:25PM (#11155764)

Bah, that'll teach me to post when I'm half asleep. At least I remembered the end rightly (ish). Clearly it's time for me to re-read his early robot anthologies.

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Re:What to do when your self-driving car decides to drive yo... by inanutshellus on Monday February 22, 2016 @09:57AM (#11151141)

Swapping wouldn't change your example. "Run me into a wall" would violate the first law and therefore the action wouldn't be followed.

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Re:What to do when your self-driving car decides to drive yo... by taneq on Monday February 22, 2016 @10:13AM (#11151280)

In my example the car is empty, so there is no first law involved. I probably could have worded it more clearly. :/

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