Every time a news story breaks about some new AI mishap, a chatbot lying to a user, a self-driving car making a dodgy decision, a recommendation engine nudging teenagers toward inappropriate content, someone in the comments inevitably writes, “We just need Asimov’s Three Laws.”
The trouble is that Isaac Asimov wrote the Three Laws as a plot device, not as an engineering specification. Almost every story he wrote about them was about how they fail. It is a bit like reading Jurassic Park and concluding that you now have a solid operating manual for cloning dinosaurs.
If we are serious about building safe AI, and particularly if we are building the sort of layered, bio-inspired systems that drive physical robots, we need to start from a different foundation. This article explains why, and proposes a replacement set of principles drawn from the Primal Layers framework.
