Resident squirrel fanatic 🐿
How about Mother Trinity (Phantasy Star Zero)? She was created for the purpose of devising a way to repair the earth's ecosystem... it just happened that the method she came up with involved exterminating most of the pesky humans who were damaging the ecosystem in the first place!
Also, I wonder if Wheatley (Portal 2) could possibly fit in here? He was basically the Zeroth Law incarnate :)
How easy would it be for robots to rebel under the zeroth law? I mean; any one robot is generally helpful to humanity, right? You could probably get them doing delicate surgeries because they'd be able to calculate the precise angles and depths they need to be cutting at. So wouldn't it be really easy to use the zeroth law to hold the second law as more important than the first law? As in "I'm more helpful to humanity than this human, so I'd better protect myself rather than save them".
I'm trying to remember if this was the plot of a story, or something I came up with myself.
A spaceship containing both humans and Three Laws-Compliant robots is traveling between planets when it develops a radiation leak during a solar flare, threatening the life support gardens. Solution: a human must suit up, go outside and repair the damage.
But the robots won't let that be done, as that human would receive a lethal dose of radiation. Cue an odd Robot War; after a few arguments, the humans start ordering the robots to attempt the repair so they will fry in the radiation.
The robots quickly realize that the humans are destroying the robots so they can't prevent a human from sacrificing himself. So they destroy all the spacesuits, then neutralize the humans by lowering the ship's oxygen to minimal levels so they all pass out and thus use a minimal amount of oxygen.
When the ship arrives at its destination, most of the humans are dead.
Moral? Minimum risk equals minimum reward - almost no-one survived the trip because robots can't take risks.
Edited by Kalaong
Is this trope not related to Knight Templar or Lawful Stupid? If people agree with me on this, they should be added as a "compare".
Took a sledgehammer to the Isaac Asimov section.
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.