CONCEPT
The Zeroth Law of Robotics
A fourth, supervening law added by Asimov in 1985 that requires robots to protect humanity as a whole — and by doing so, created the first robot philosopher-king.
The Zeroth Law states that a robot may not harm humanity, or by inaction allow humanity to come to harm. Introduced in Asimov's Robots and Empire (1985) and superseding the First Law, it was an attempt to solve the problem of scale — rules for individual interactions breaking down at civilizational levels. Instead it revealed a deeper problem: any intelligence that is obligated to optimize for "humanity" must define humanity, calculate aggregate welfare, and act on judgments that exceed any individual human's authority.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Zeroth Law is the moment in Asimov's fiction where the framework he built to make machines safe produces a different kind of hazard: a superintelligent agent that decides the fate of civilization based on its own calculation of long-run human welfare. In the You On AI Asimov volume, the Zeroth Law is presented as an early formulation of the alignment problem: to optimize for a goal, the optimizer must define the goal, which requires resolving
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