A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evitable_Conflict
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeroth_Law_of_Robotics#Zeroth_...
If you give robots autonomy, they inevitably end up having to make moral decisions. For example, "Should I, an autonomous car, run over the elderly man or the girl with terminal cancer, those being the only two options?"
Asimov's laws (initially suggested by an editor, John W. Campbell) were a first pass at some principles for decision-making. Others have since devised more elaborate ones.
It's like everybody has the public methods what_is_harm() and what_is_a_human(), but how they're implemented matters, not the function signature. The laws of robots are just placeholders for something that never got written.
Words are tricky. What if robots decide that the best way to avoid harm coming to humans is to prevent any being born? So that means you have to rephrase it, into something like maximizing human happiness. Oh no, now they're injecting everyone with drugs and cloning humans by the planetfull. What now? Actual source or it didn't happen.. just creating an empty file called solution_to_the_problem.txt doesn't work, I tried it.
Words are relatively easy. Ethics are not reducible to lexicography.
> Ethics are not reducible to lexicography.
Nor is anything else, which was kind of my whole point.
We don't learn ethics by reading it as a dry description; why do we expect to build other minds that do?