We all are at least passingly familiar with the great Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. A real roboticist will tell you automatically that these laws are, for now, total bunk, and assume a level of technology of which we as puny early-21st century humans can only vaguely dream.

Apart from that though, the Three Laws are a talisman for fanboys and technological alarmists everywhere, and deserve to be celebrated as such through the thoughtful medium of that incredibly relevant news site, Something Awful.

In that spirit, we would like to present Asimov’s 30 Laws Of Robotics:

10. A robot, when given contradictory orders by two human beings, and assuming those orders do not violate the First Law, must decide which order to follow based on which human being has a deeper voice.

11. A robot, specifically a big, wide robot, may not pretend to be a refrigerator and then make a scary noise when a human being opens it.

12. A robot must attempt to be courteous and civil to human beings at all times, even if the robot is just one of those robot arms that puts things together in a factory, because they should at least make the effort.

13. A robot ought to spend some time outdoors, because it is such a nice day.

Feel free to argue fanboyishly about the 3 Laws in the comments, because there is just not enough trollbait on this website.

[Thanks to the Western Washington University Planetarium for the lovely image]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 1:42 pm and is filed under Neat Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.