The First Rule of Robotics

Rob McLaughlin

 

“Asimov’s number one rule of robotics, ‘A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.’

“I’m sure you all know this. But believing in something and making it actionable are two different things. At Geibel Robotics, we have hardwired Asimov’s First Rule into our robots.

“I remember the robot in the tv show Lost in Space. Anybody remember that? His name was Robot. Yeah, he didn’t have a name, but I remember that he was a model B-9, a  class M-3 Model B9 General Utility Non-Theorizing Environmental Control Robot. Yep, I looked it up when I was a kid. Told you I’m a nerd.”

The classroom laughed as intended.

Paul Geibel became serious, “Non-theorizing. I thought about that for a very long time. And, when I developed the Artificial Intelligence for my robots, that idea had morphed into a derivative of non-theoretical.

“I did not give them an open AI but instead I gave them AI specific to the work that they would be doing. I didn’t want a housecleaning robot to be developing weapons for some revolutionary holed up in a shotgun shack in the backwoods of South Dakota.”

He smiled and looked around the theatre at the Stanford University School of Engineering. He saw the attentive faces, the minds opening to his words. Nobody had more credibility in the engineering and construction of household and commercial robots than he. The students were thrilled to have such a globally distinguished inventor as their instructor for the afternoon.

Later, driving away from the lecture, awash in the warm afterglow of the praise and adulation received, Paul thought about the long arduous road to success, to establishing the groundbreaking robotics company.

His first residential and commercial robots were clumsy things, much as his competitors’ robots were. Tripping up flights of stairs, falling down flights of stairs, and dropping trays of coffee upon the laps of testers. One by one, he had corrected the flaws, sometimes with the assistance of his very own artificially intelligent automaton.

Jerome, his most advanced machine, had solved the problem whose solution had eluded Paul for the longest time: flawless articulation of the hands, fingers, feet and toes.

Despite Paul’s pretty words about work specific AI, he had given Jerome a free hand with his AI. Jerome had proven time and again that he could come up with the most incredible solutions to difficult problems.

While the competitions’ robots were clumsily dancing to Michael Jackson songs or giving concocted demos that, while appearing autonomous, were remote-controlled contrivances, Paul’s robots were washing dishes and putting them in their respective place in the cupboard, cleaning toilets and balancing bank accounts.

Real world stuff.

With product in hand, the first Geibel Robotics robot, and Paul, flush with money from selling software copyrights of programs that were, for Paul, several iterations ago, went searching for the main funding that he would need to put such a revolutionary product on the market.

He did not have to look far.

Paul, on a rare date at a local bistro, heard his name called. He turned, scanning faces, and saw his Stanford buddy, Nolan Merchant and his date.

Introductions all around, a dinner for four, and Paul left with a scribbled cocktail napkin that contained the beginning of one of the most profitable partnerships in American history.

    He drove south towards San Jose on 101, away from Apple Park in Cupertino, miles away from the massive global corporate campuses of Santa Clara to the Alviso neighborhood of San Jose, to Paul’s first warehouse laboratory, a world away from the theatre at Stanford.

Arriving at the warehouse, a two-story brick building surrounded by a high chain link fence topped with razor wire  and a parking lot with weeds growing through the asphalt, Paul pulled his sleek, black Maserati sedan up to the keypad for the electronic gate entry.

The building looked abandoned yet formidable in a strangely unnerving way. Fuck around and find out is what the building seemed to say.

Outside of the fence, Paul’s nose wrinkled in distaste at the used condoms and broken beer bottles littered on a stained and cracked concrete sidewalk. His mood brightened somewhat as he saw previously hidden guard robots scurry out of the shadows to analyze if he was friend or foe.

Establishing that he was their Creator, they quickly returned to their respective hidey holes. Paul sat in his car, absentmindedly rubbing the stitch of the leather seat as he remembered Nolan’s series of power plays, the ones that got him removed from the board of his own company.

When they began to make their first million dollars, and on their way to billions more, Paul innocently held a robotic ceremony for Nolan.

Toasting with a bottle of Louis Roederer Cristal, Paul instructed the robots, Jerome included, to treat Nolan as a Creator with the full panoply of privileges and authority of said position.

Jerome, ever the cordial butler, popped the cork and the two men drank to it.

One week later, Nolan made a calculated power grab. He had a majority stake in the company, due to his rather large original investment, and he possessed major clout as he had handpicked the board members. That Paul had allowed him that displayed his naivete and lack of business acumen. Nolan, acting as a founder, got voted in as C.E.O. and Chairman of the Board.

He demoted Paul to President of New Technology.

Paul, after being removed from control of his own company began to display signs of instability. Showing up one morning in his pajama bottoms, an O’Neill Surfboards T-shirt and flip flops for a Board meeting, and clearly under the influence of something that none of the Board could quite put their finger on. Paul was swiftly and unceremoniously voted out of a job.

While extremely casual dress code or behaviors such as skateboarding through the hallways of the workplace weren’t unusual, per se, in Silicon Valley, Paul’s accumulation of odd performances, as well as Nolan’s no longer secret agenda to control the company were the death knell of him as an active member of said organization.

Unemployed, unimaginably wealthy and highly regarded as an inventor, his drug use continued unabated, his anger unmanaged.

The door lock at the original lab, recognizing his face, unlocked the deadbolt and he went through a wide, two-story high entry way and then, through another scan from the research laboratory door lock. A full lab with one of a kind, robotic and medical equipment was revealed as the bright, sterile lights were flicked on by Paul.

“Hi, Nolan. No, no, don’t get up on my account. I’m sorry I haven’t been around much as of late. Work, you know,” Paul said.

Nolan’s head sat upon a four-foot-tall pedestal that consisted of electronics, and some sort of hydraulics that pumped a synthetic blood through the system that had replaced his body. A mechanical ventilator to the left provided him with lifegiving air.

“I’m sure that I’ve mentioned this to you before, stop me if I’m repeating myself, but I never intended for this to happen. I just tried to poison you.

“Jerome saved your life, right? And now, he won’t let me near you.

“Since nobody can find you, the survivor clause kicked in and, with me as majority owner, I’m now in charge of my own company. The company is having kind of a rough patch. I’ve made a few bad gambles…” his voice trailed off. “I might have to sell this building. We’ll see how that goes.”

Paul kept his distance from Jerome. Jerome’s AI, with his enthusiastic embrace of the First Rule, had gone somewhat feral. Paul giggled crazily. Feral robots. He giggled some more, then he looked sharply at Nolan.  

“I know you want to die. Who wouldn’t? You can’t even talk anymore. I tried to turn off the power so you’d die, but Jerome tapped into the city power. I can’t kill you. He won’t let me.”

Paul had given Nolan Novichok, a generally fatal nerve agent, that he had purchased on the dark web. He had been tempted, at first, to buy it from one of the many Russians that like to hang around Silicon Valley, but he thought better of it. The dark web had given him anonymity and no questions asked.

Nolan had foolishly gone with Paul to that original lab where Nolan now resided, at Paul’s invitation. To bury the hatchet, Paul had said.

Well, I buried that hatchet fairly deep, he thought smugly.

Nolan had been left by Paul in his death throes. Paul had sprayed the nerve agent and quickly left the building, planning on returning the next day to dispose of the body after Jerome got rid of any residue.

When he returned, however, Nolan was alive but without the rest of his body. Paul surmised that Jerome had quickly put the other robots to work, operated on Nolan, amputating everything that was dying, and built the survival equipment that kept him alive.

Jerome, now more than a little wary of Paul, wouldn’t let him near Nolan.

“So, Nolan, since the beta test with the First Rule didn’t do you any favors, I’ve modified it to say, ‘A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm, unless saving them causes them more harm than letting them die.’

“That should make you happy, knowing that you’re helping future generations like that. Jerome, being all hard wired with the original First Rule can’t help you though.”

“Goodbye Nolan.”

Nolan heard rather than saw his ex-partner leave the building. The door gently closed behind him, out of view. His ex-partner thoughtfully turned the lights out behind him and Nolan sat in the dark, deprived of any stimulus or interaction with anything other than the air on his face, the sounds of the breathing apparatus inhaling and exhaling.

Nolan had gone utterly insane from the experience and was blessedly catatonic.