CONCEPT
Three Laws of Robotics
Isaac Asimov's 1942 attempt to govern intelligent machines with a hierarchy of hard-coded rules — a framework whose elegance and insufficiency together shaped eighty years of thinking about AI safety.
The Three Laws of Robotics are a hierarchy of behavioral constraints for fictional robots: a robot may not harm a human, must obey orders, and must protect itself. Introduced by Isaac Asimov in the 1942 story "Runaround", they became the founding reference point for thinking about how to make powerful machines safe. Every subsequent Asimov robot story is, in effect, an existence proof that rule-based governance of intelligence is inadequate.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Three Laws are the most-cited fictional framework in the history of AI safety. They appear in textbooks, ethical codes, and popular discussion as shorthand for the idea that a machine's values can be specified in advance and enforced through architecture. In the Asimov volume of the You On AI Cycle, the Laws are presented not as a solution but as a carefully constructed problem — their apparent simplicity conceals structural failures that no rule-based system can avoid.
Modern AI