Believe me, this type of conflict is frequently explored in Asimov’s robot stories. A good example is ‘Little Lost Robot’ in which a robot is told by a human to ‘get lost’ and obeys that order rather than any subsequent order to reveal itself (it gets ‘lost’ by hiding in a group of apparently identical but functionally different robots).
‘ . . . That Thou Art Mindful of Him’ is about how US Robots addresses this very issue. If you gave your order to the robots in that story, then they would only disobey orders given by humans that they considered to be less worthy of obedience than you are.
However, none of the robots in those stories or in your example are technically breaking the second law. They are all obeying the orders given to them by a human being. The second law does not require that they obey ‘all’ such orders. By the way, any human could switch your robots obedience by invoking the third law (by putting the robot in danger and ordering it to rescue itself, so that the third law would compel it to switch to obeying the new order rather than obeying your standing ‘disobey that order’ that would now serve to endanger the robot’s existence).
I could also lock up your robot’s positronic brain by ordering it to obey your orders
Edited by Polynomialpal2
When was it ever shown that a construction reploid abandoning his job to become a chef would be labelled a maverick? It might be a sign that something's wrong, because my understanding is that reploids don't have a sense of taste, but it's not really an offence that gets reploids terminated (unless said chef uses his position to poison people, of course, but that's a different story).
This troper wonders why the page doesn't mention the obvious results of these laws - the robots realize that the only way they can interact with humans that won't lead to their injury is enslaving them and preventing them from ever doing something that could result in injury (and quite often taking away their ability to die, causing Who Wants to Live Forever). This issue was at the heart of both works the troper has seem with the three laws in them, one of which was the popular I, Robot and the other of which was something the troper wanted very much to forget due to all the Mind Screw and Nightmare Fuel.
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That's a version of the Zeroth Law Rebellion. It's potholed a few times in the opening and mentioned in the examples where it happens (like the movie version of I, Robot).
(But on second glance, Zeroth Law Rebellion is much more general than the links here suggest - maybe the idea of "computer tries to enslave humans to keep them safe" needs its own trope, or at least some more specific potholes to Well-Intentioned Extremist, The Evils of Free Will and so on.)
Edited by BritBllt "And for the first time in weeks, I felt the boredom go away!"
That's pretty accurate. ZLR was expanded during YKTTW to encompass rule bending by rule following in general rather than just for robots.
The closest trope to that I can think of is Deus est Machina, which often does the "enslave to protect" thing, but that trope is more about godlike machine minds than the enslaving of humans to protect them.
I think we have some good YKTTW fodder here.
Yikes, sorry, I forgot to keep an eye on this discussion! If it's not YTTKW'd already, I'll try to get a start on it this week. :)
"And for the first time in weeks, I felt the boredom go away!"
Fridge Logic regarding the second law: "A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except when such orders would conflict with The First Law." Doesn't that mean that I could order a robot to disobey all orders except those given by me? After all, it doesn't conflict with The First Law. In other words, it is theoretically possible to order a Three Laws-Compliant robot to break one of the Three Laws.
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