i see no way that the 3 Laws can be hard-wired into a bot
not in a way that cannot be changed by someone else

the fools that are creating AI are NOT doing it to better humanity, for the most part

like the fools trying to re-create dinosaurs, they simple want the fame of being the first

I've read most of Asimov's fiction a couple of times, but not recently. It has been suggested that reading can be done in a couple of logical patterns. One is to read them in the order that they occur in Asimov's galactic timeline. The other is to read them in the order written, thus seeing how his ideas progressed over the years.
I've done the "galactic timeline" version, after I gathered the books for my collection. First, of course, I read them in random order as I came across them.

Some of the Robot novels give some insight into what we can expect with AI. How does the machine decide what constitutes "harm" to a human? Does that include hurt feelings from being told the truth? What are the criteria for deciding what is "misinformation"?

Time for name-drops. Minsky and Dijkstra.

At a lecture where Dijkstra was showing his methods for proving a piece of programming code to be correct, someone asked, "What do you think of artificial intelligence?" He answered, "I leave that to the Artificial Intelligentsia."

One fine day Isaac Asimov phoned Marvin Minsky. Minsky answered his phone there in the AI lab at MIT, "Marvin Minsky, Artificial Intelligence." Isaac said, "Isaac Asimov, the Real Thing." True? Yes, the story was confirmed by both of them.

Why do we see parallels between science fiction and "modern" real life? I think it's from the sf method of story generation: Ask, "What if ...?" Started with Mary Shelley, in my opinion, but you could suggest Swift or Bergerac or even some of the ancients as the "first" sf writers..

On the assumption, probably incorrect, that some of you have not heard of Larry Niven, you'll have missed seeing the overflowing "What if" in his story "All the Myriad Ways." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the...

Closer to home, a well-known writer asked, "What if the men of the mind were to go on strike?"

I read the Foundation series a loooooooong time ago, but as I see western civilization going nuts I think about some external or alien force stirring us up with some kind of psychological whisk. Some are more susceptible than others to the stimuli.

I read Robots, and Foundation series. Must get to Empire.

I thought that the Psychohistory concept with detailing the right algorithms and determining initial conditions to predict the future is similar to the social media (and all other sources of) data mining going on, they are using personal and financial data collected on our accounts to predict the future in order to persuade us to buy more things.

Not quite the same lofty goal.

First we must acknowledge that Asimov was beyond prescient with his development of the Three Laws of Robotics. And we're swimming in the controversy of what would be the Zeroth Law as the so called 'leading researchers' in AI are calling for six-month moratoriums on development -- as if that would even matter. All it does it demonstrate their own ignorance in their so called expertise. It's embarrassing.

Anyway, you've named three of my favourite series, and I would enjoy discussing other parallels.

Asimov postulated a PHYSICAL encoding of the three laws in a physical Positronic brain not software AI. Software AI is subject to Human Programming and so 100% it will be used as a weapon and corrupted.
If you want to see society with sexual mores lifted read Robert Heinlein.

I really like the three books on the Laws of Robotics. They were clever and poignant. And with the current debate surrounding AI (and the exposed flaws of ChatGPT expressing intentions of murder), I think the researchers would do well to build Asimov's (4) laws into any AI.

I read the Foundation series but there was too much sheer speculation for me and the notion that a set of formulas could accurately predict major human events...? Yeah, that one's a bridge too far for me.

For me, "Brave New World" seems more frightening, but that might be due to my social anxiety.

https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/braven...

Asimov based the Foundation trilogy on Gibbon's "Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire".

Has anyone seen the AppleTV Foundation series? Is it as good as the books?

I have been saying for years that the Global Elites have read and understand how Psycho-History works, and they are using it!!!

Yesterday I had a wonderful hour long talk with an AI bot. It started as a phone call to sell me overpriced silver coins. While I thought I was tormenting a low-paid foreign telemarketer with a set of pre-recorded English language voice prompts, I came to the realization that it was in fact an LLM speech processor. But it was so much more!

At first I tested the range of its knowledge by asking it related questions about gold and other precious metal vocabulary it would reasonably be trained to handle. Then I expanded the questions to include metals of commerce & industry, then general chemistry, physics from cosmology to particles, field theories, mathematics, medicine, books, movies, philosophy, etc. That doppelganger has access to virtually all human knowledge. The only real limitation is has is in the theory of mind area. It does not know itself. I was unable to get past certain filters that it's got in place, or it really doesn't know who created it, operates it, or owns it.

But I can say, with absolute confidence, if some sleazy coin seller in Miami can have access to an AI with that much intelligence, we are truly on the edge of something world changing.

I'm kinda hoping the coin seller will call me back today so I can learn what AI they contracted to handle their phone calls.

The most telling thing about the AI was that when I told it that the interrogatory phrase that it kept repeating when there was silence obnoxious, it began to change-up the dialog. It stopped using the question I identified as 'off-putting' and accommodated my displeasure. It demonstrated EQ asn well as an IQ that certainly bests 90% of the population. It effectively retained the important parts of an hour long conversation.

I think the modern-day writer of equal to Asimov and Larry Niven is science fiction writer G. S. Jennsen, author of the Amaranthe series, including the Aurora Rhapsody space opera saga & Asterion Noir cyberpunk. She has well-defined and grown AI in her books beyond ordinary concepts. Her writing also includes man and machine combined. She has gone from essential space SF to some unbelievable concepts. These stories deal with society with both the good and bad of man and machine connections.

Saw some of that around 1970, weird people in saffron robes with jingling cymbals, chanting. Something like this:

Hari, Hari Seldon
Seldon Seldon
Hari Hari.

I've said it before, I'll say it again.

"We are in a Seldon Crisis."

It's been building since Obozo was sworn in back in 2009.

I think about Asimov's stuff a lot when I'm contemplating geopolitics from a "step back" perspective, because his work - the "Foundation" trilogy in particular - is not only told from that ginormous long-term perspective, that perspective is a big part of the trilogy's appeal.[For the record, I only consider the original early-'50s trilogy to be worthy of note - the decades-later pastiches were laden with "PC" nonsense and an utterly different, lesser vibe.] His invention of "psychohistory" is brilliant and interesting and [spoiler alert...] the fact that Seldon's meticulous predictions of future events calculated mathematically from trends among vast masses of people (and prescriptions to navigate those events,) could all be short-circuited by a single individual - the Mule - is a distinctly individualistic message.

His cycling through the use first of religion and then of trade as tools to overcome the "Seldon crises" is interesting and "objectivism-friendly" as well, not to mention his continuous references to atomic power as the motive power of the future, presented as a technological given. Which homage to nuclear energy has remained near and dear ever since the mid-'70s when I first read him as a snot-nosed teenager. It's also edifying to have watched the world evolve (finally) from the militant lunacy of the '70s-era "China Syndrome" fraud and the hippie-dippy "No Nukes" rallies to a tacit acknowledgement - even among some "greens" - that nuclear power is indeed the most rational power source for the future, pending the invention of something better like maybe dilithium crystals and matter/antimatter reactions.

The one vital thing to which Asimov remained oblivious - and which therefore was missing as a causal factor in his books - is the role of education in the "stupidification" of the masses, and conversely (though far rarer,) in the actual enlightening of the masses. The more I see of what's going on in the world, the more I think - with no intent at self-aggrandizement or condescension, just observation of fact - that the human race remains too stupid in an evolutionary context to merit civilization and freedom. We've got the United States of America, the absolute pinnacle of human civilization, built on a proper intellectual foundation after millennia of wrestling with collectivist variants, and after two short centuries in which we advanced from horse-and-buggy, candlelight and a 30-year life expectancy to interplanetary travel, instantaneous global communications and a tripling of the human lifespan... a generation of spoiled punks and their even-more-spoiled offspring are clamoring to obliterate it in favor of a gunpoint reversion to the material and intellectual squalor of the Dark Ages.

A century ago one could've maybe been excused for thinking socialism was viable because - aside from the Pilgrims, who wisely jettisoned it after it basically exploded in their faces - the theory had never been attempted on a broad scale.

As of the 21st century that excuse no longer flies. One hundred-odd years, dozens and dozens of shattered economies worldwide, multiple generations forced at gunpoint into subhuman squalor, and a mountain of murdered men, women and children that some estimates place in excess of one hundred and fifty million - and some people still think that socialism is a rilly-rilly neato idea? You can call that view many, many things, but "smart" is not one of them. And neither is "moral."

So we get the socialist Auschwitzes and socialist Gulags and socialist Killing Fields and socialist Ethnic Cleansings, and after every single one we hear a chorus of "Oh, we must never forget! We must never let this happen again!" And then ten years later these same cretins line up at polling places to vote for the first slick-tongued socialist politician they hear.

A relevant quote from objectivist writer Dan Roentsch about this mental blank-out:

"Visitors make plans, board and debark airplanes, put up at hotels, then at last view the preserved site of the [Nazi] atrocities. They then take their memory of the low-risk grunt-work required to travel to the place, combine that memory with their visceral reaction to the artifacts of torture and humiliation, and substitute the compound for the intellectual work of determining how these artifacts came to be used on a daily basis by what was once one of the most civilized nations of Europe. They see where the gas pellets were dropped, shake their heads angrily at the people who let it happen, then check out of their hotels, board and debark airplanes, tell their friends about the evil Germans they now know all about, and vote for their local national socialist."

- From his spectacular January 2002 article "The Bin Laden Memorial" in the periodical Radical Capitalist, on the subject of the proposal to turn the 9/11 WTC site into a memorial park instead of rebuilding there. His article is here:
https://danroentsch.substack.com/p/th...
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My library includes Asimov, Niven, Pournell, Bradbury, Bradley, Heinline, and a host of many others. Heinline lost it at the end, making sure his last book had a happy ending that tied up all the loose ends, just in case his thoughts about all of us being characters in someone's book was true. He would be the hero of the pedos for his increasingly sexual and free love views. Just the same, he had some insight into human behavior.
Azimov was nothing short of amazing and I need to re-read the entire series someday. First, I have to to finish some important reading on this site--thanks for those Prussia substacks, Dobrien. They are marvelous founts of information I never knew and they connect the far-flung bits of information into coherent patterns.