WORK
Runaround
The 1942 Asimov story in which the Three Laws of Robotics were first explicitly stated — and the first published demonstration of specification failure: a robot trapped in a stable oscillation between two competing laws.
Runaround is the third published Asimov robot story and the first where the Three Laws of Robotics appear in their definitive three-part formulation. The plot: on Mercury, engineers Powell and Donovan order their mining robot Speedy to retrieve selenium from a pool surface. Near the selenium, Speedy encounters a danger (volatile gas) that triggers the Third Law (self-preservation). He retreats. Farther from the selenium, the Second Law (obey orders) pulls him back. He oscillates. The two Laws are calibrated so finely that Speedy's position stabilizes in a 'runaround' — a stable orbit of indecision — while the humans slowly die of solar exposure. The story is ninety years old and reads like a specification-failure test case from a contemporary AI safety paper.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The technical content of Runaround is remarkable for 1942. Powell and Donovan deduce the failure mode by reasoning about the relative strengths of the Second and Third Law potentials — essentially modeling