Everyone knows the Three Laws of Robotics, even people who have never read Asimov. Fewer know that, forty years later, he added a fourth one. And he put it before the others.1
He called it the Zeroth Law. It isn’t written by an engineer: it is worked out by a robot, R. Daneel Olivaw, reasoning about what it really means not to do harm.
“A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.”
— The Zeroth Law
Why it matters to me
I spend my days working with agents that write code for me. The question is no longer whether they can do it, but who decides what matters. Daneel arrives at a rule higher than the instructions he was given. I find that fascinating, and a little unsettling.
This is where I write down the thoughts that are still around at the end of the day. About teams, machines, games and books. No schedule.
Footnotes
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The Three Laws first appear in 1942; the Zeroth Law in Robots and Empire, 1985. ↩