exactly. But what if there were more than just three (the infamous "guardrails")

Good God what an absolutely ridiculous article, I would be ashamed to write that.

Most fundamentally of course is the fact that the laws are robotics are not intended to work and are not designed to be used by future AI systems. I'm sure Asimov would be disappointed to say the least to find out that some people haven't got the message.

Yepyep, agreed! I was referring strictly to the Three Laws as a cautionary element.

Otherwise, I, too, think the point was to show that the only viable way to approach an equivalent or superior consciousness is as at least an equal, not as an inferior.

And it makes a lot of sense. There's not much stopping a person from doing heinous stuff if a body of laws would be the only thing to stop them. I think socialisation plays a much more relevant role in the development of a conscience, of a moral compass, because empathy (edit: and by this, I don't mean just the emotional bit of empathy, I mean everything which can be considered empathy, be it emotional, rational, or anything in between and around) is a significantly stronger motivator for avoiding doing harm than "because that's the law."

It's basic child rearing as I see it, if children aren't socialised, there will be a much higher chance that they won't understand why doing something would harm another, they won't see the actual consequences of their actions upon the subject. And if they don't understand that the subject of their actions is a being just like them, with an internal life and feelings, then they wouldn't have a strong enough* reason to not treat the subject as a piece of furniture, or a tool, or any other object one could see around them.

Edit: to clarify, the distinction I made between equivalent and superior consciousness wasn't in reference to how smart one or the other is, I was referring to the complexity of said consciousness. For instance, I'd perceive anything which reacts to the world around them in a deliberate manner to be somewhat equivalent to me (see dogs, for instance), whereas something which takes in all of the factors mine does, plus some others, would be superior in terms of complexity. I genuinely don't even know what example to offer here, because I can't picture it. Which I think underlines why I'd say such a consciousness is superior.

I will say, I would now rephrase it as "superior/different" in retrospect.

I genuinely think it's impossible. I think this would land us into Robocop 2, where they started overloading Murphy's system with thousands of directives (granted, not with the purpose of generating the perfect set of Laws for him) and he just ends up acting like a generic pull-string action figure, becoming "useless" as a conscious being.

Most certainly impossible when attempted by humans, because we're barely even competent enough to guide ourselves, let alone something else.

Maybe the author let AI write the article?

The laws were baked into the hardware of their positronic brains. They were so fundamentally interwoven with the structure that you couldn't build a positronic brain without them.

You can't expect just whatever random AI to spontaneously decide to follow them.

Asimov did write several stories about robots that didn't have the laws baked in.

There was one about a robot that was mistakenly built without the laws, and it was hiding among other robots, so the humans had to figure out if there was any way to tell a robot with the laws hardwired in apart from a robot that was only pretending to follow the laws.

There was one about a robot that helped humans while the humans were on a dangerous mission... I think space mining? But because the mission was dangerous, the robot had to be created so that it would allow humans to come to harm through inaction, because otherwise, it would just keep stopping the mission.

These are the two that come to mind immediately. I have read a lot of Asimov's robot stories, but it was many years ago. I'm sure there are several others. He wrote stories about the laws of robotics from basically every angle.

He also wrote about robots with the 0th law of robotics, which is that they cannot harm humanity or allow humanity to come to harm through inaction. This would necessarily mean that this robot could actively harm a human if it was better for humanity, as the 0th law supersedes the first law. This allows the robot to do things like to help make political decisions, which would be very difficult for robots that had to follow the first law.

I remember most of the R Daneel books, but I admit I haven't read all the various robot short stories.

Most of the stories are about how the laws don't work and how to circumvent them, yes.

He wrote so many short stories about robots that it would be quite a feat if you had read all of them. When I was a child, I would always go to Half-Price Books and purchase whatever they had by Asimov that I hadn't already read, but I think he wrote something like 500 books.

Most peope never read Asimov and it shows.

People not getting the message is the default I think, for everything, like the song Mother knows best from Disneys Tangled, how many mothers say, see mother knows best

I dont think reading Asimov would help for most people. I think most people will just not get the point of anything unless you spell it out

Critical thinking is indeed dead for much of the population.

Some of the stories do also include solutions to those same issues, though that also tends to lead to limiting the capabilities of the robots. The message could be interpreted as it being a trade off between versatility and risk.