Editing Three Laws of Robotics (section)

===Unknowing breach of the laws===
In ''[[The Naked Sun]]'', [[Elijah Baley]] points out that the Laws had been deliberately misrepresented because robots could ''unknowingly'' break any of them. He restated the first law as "A robot may do nothing that, ''to its knowledge,'' will harm a human being; nor, through inaction, ''knowingly'' allow a human being to come to harm." This change in wording makes it clear that robots can become the tools of murder, provided they not be aware of the nature of their tasks; for instance being ordered to add something to a person's food, not knowing that it is poison. Furthermore, he points out that a clever criminal could divide a task among multiple robots so that no individual robot could recognize that its actions would lead to harming a human being.<ref name="TNSPoison">{{cite book|last=Asimov|first=Isaac|title=The Naked Sun (ebook)|year=1956–1957|page=233|quote=... one robot poison an arrow without knowing it was using poison, and having a second robot hand the poisoned arrow to the boy ...}}</ref> ''The Naked Sun'' complicates the issue by portraying a decentralized, planetwide communication network among Solaria's millions of robots meaning that the criminal mastermind could be located anywhere on the planet.

Baley furthermore proposes that the Solarians may one day use robots for military purposes. If a spacecraft was built with a positronic brain and carried neither humans nor the life-support systems to sustain them, then the ship's robotic intelligence could naturally assume that all other spacecraft were robotic beings. Such a ship could operate more responsively and flexibly than one crewed by humans, could be armed more heavily and its robotic brain equipped to slaughter humans of whose existence it is totally ignorant.<ref name="TNSSpaceship">{{cite book|last=Asimov|first=Isaac|title=The Naked Sun (ebook)|year=1956–1957|page=240|quote=But a spaceship that was equipped with its own positronic brain would cheerfully attack any ship it was directed to attack, it seems to me. It would naturally assume all other ships were unmanned}}</ref> This possibility is referenced in ''[[Foundation and Earth]]'' where it is discovered that the Solarians possess a strong police force of unspecified size that has been programmed to identify only the Solarian race as human. (The novel takes place thousands of years after The Naked Sun, and the Solarians have long since modified themselves from normal humans to hermaphroditic telepaths with extended brains and specialized organs.) Similarly, in ''[[Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn]]'' Bigman attempts to speak with a Sirian robot about possible damage to the Solar System population from its actions, but it appears unaware of the data and programmed to ignore attempts to teach it about the matter. The same motive was explored earlier in "[[Reason (short story)|Reason (1941)]]", where a robot running a [[Space-based solar power|solar power station]] refuses to believe that the destinations of the station's beams are planets containing people. [[Powell and Donovan]] are afraid this will make it capable of causing mass destruction by letting the beams stray off their proper course during a solar storm.