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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

You do realize that, as stated, these laws are (1) practically impossible to implement, (2) routinely broken by humans (especially the first law - life-sacing and cosmetic surgery, piercings, sport, euthanasia, abortion), and (3) a matter of philosophical/moral subject, decisions about which, IMO, should be in the domain of humans, not robots.

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Didn't Asimov himself explore the difficulties with such laws at length in his books?

In the books the robots adhered to the laws strictly. The problem was that humans were able to circumvent the laws rather easily. For example; lie to the robot or divide the murder trough many robots each unaware of each other. In absence of humans the robots were perfect for deciding moral subjects( as long they have enough information ), the opposite what tomp is suggesting.

His book I, Robot is a series of short stories in which the laws have been tampered with in various ways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Robot#Contents

I should have specified I mean only the Robot trilogy. I have yet to read every book.

He explored many issues, e.g. what happens when robots misinterpret the laws, or what should very expensive robots do, or what happens if robots interpret emotional pain as "harm", but I'm not sure he investigated the obvious, yet extremely hard issue of encoding the laws from human language into computer program.

How are they practically impossible to implement?

Enforce might be a better choice of words.

I'm only three-quarters-joking when I say that there could be a blockchain consensus solution for this (Ethereum, BitShares, etc).

Humans "operate" using emotions and logical biases, but computers "operate" using logic. To implement the first law, you must be certain that there is always something that an agent can do or must not do in order to "save" humans. This is almost always not true (hence moral disagreements).

Also, even if you change the laws to get rid of logical inconsistencies, you still have to translate the words into logic, by strictly defining them, which is again impossible (as humans disagree what these words mean).

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