Editing Three Laws of Robotics (section)

===Ambiguities resulting from lack of definition===
The Laws of Robotics presume that the terms "human being" and "robot" are understood and well defined. In some stories this presumption is overturned.

====Definition of "human being"====
The [[Solaria (fictional planet)|Solaria]]ns create robots with the Three Laws but with a warped meaning of "human". Solarian robots are told that only people speaking with a Solarian accent are human. This enables their robots to have no ethical dilemma in harming non-Solarian human beings (and they are specifically programmed to do so). By the time period of ''[[Foundation and Earth]]'' it is revealed that the Solarians have genetically modified themselves into a distinct species from humanity—becoming hermaphroditic<ref>{{cite web |title=Foundation and Earth (1986) |url=http://www.gotterdammerung.org/books/isaac-asimov/foundation-and-earth.html |publisher=gotterdammerung.org |access-date=11 November 2010 |author=Branislav L. Slantchev |archive-date=25 September 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240925011021/http://www.gotterdammerung.org/books/isaac-asimov/foundation-and-earth.html |url-status=live }}</ref> and [[Psychokinesis|psychokinetic]] and containing biological organs capable of individually powering and controlling whole complexes of robots. The robots of Solaria thus respected the Three Laws only with regard to the "humans" of Solaria. It is unclear whether all the robots had such definitions, since only the overseer and guardian robots were shown explicitly to have them. In "Robots and Empire", the lower class robots were instructed by their overseer about whether certain creatures are human or not.

Asimov addresses the problem of humanoid robots ("[[android (robot)|androids]]" in later parlance) several times. The novel ''[[Robots and Empire]]'' and the short stories "[[Evidence (Asimov)|Evidence]]" and "The Tercentenary Incident" describe robots crafted to fool people into believing that the robots are human.<ref name="ROBANDEMP1">{{cite book |last=Asimov |first=Isaac |title=Robots and Empire |publisher=Doubleday books |isbn=978-0-385-19092-3 |author-link=Isaac Asimov |page=[https://archive.org/details/robotsempire00asim/page/151 151] |quote=although the woman looked as human as Daneel did, she was just as nonhuman |year=1985 |url=https://archive.org/details/robotsempire00asim/page/151 }}</ref> On the other hand, "[[The Bicentennial Man]]" and "[[—That Thou Art Mindful of Him]]" explore how the robots may change their interpretation of the Laws as they grow more sophisticated. [[Gwendoline Butler]] writes in ''A Coffin for the Canary'' "Perhaps we are robots. Robots acting out the last Law of Robotics... To tend towards the human."<ref>{{cite book| last=Butler| first=Gwendoline| title=A Coffin for the Canary| publisher=Black Dagger Crime| year=2001| isbn=978-0-7540-8580-5}}</ref> In ''[[The Robots of Dawn]]'', [[Elijah Baley]] points out that the use of humaniform robots as the first wave of settlers on new Spacer worlds may lead to the robots seeing themselves as the true humans, and deciding to keep the worlds for themselves rather than allow the Spacers to settle there.

"—That Thou Art Mindful of Him", which Asimov intended to be the "ultimate" probe into the Laws' subtleties,<ref>Gunn (1980); reprinted in Gunn (1982), p. 73.</ref> finally uses the Three Laws to conjure up the very "Frankenstein" scenario they were invented to prevent. It takes as its concept the growing development of robots that mimic non-human living things and are given programs that mimic simple animal behaviours which do not require the Three Laws. The presence of a whole range of robotic life that serves the same purpose as organic life ends with two humanoid robots, George Nine and George Ten, concluding that organic life is an unnecessary requirement for a truly logical and self-consistent definition of "humanity", and that since they are the most advanced thinking beings on the planet, they are therefore the only two true humans alive and the Three Laws only apply to themselves. The story ends on a sinister note as the two robots enter hibernation and await a time when they will conquer the Earth and subjugate biological humans to themselves, an outcome they consider an inevitable result of the "Three Laws of Humanics".<ref name="TCRMindful1">{{cite book |last=Asimov |first=Isaac |title=The Complete Robot |year=1982 |publisher=Nightfall, Inc. |author-link=Isaac Asimov|page=611|chapter=... That Thou Art Mindful Of Him}}</ref>

This story does not fit within the overall sweep of the ''Robot'' and [[Foundation Series|''Foundation'' series]]; if the George robots ''did'' take over Earth some time after the story closes, the later stories would be either redundant or impossible. Contradictions of this sort among Asimov's fiction works have led scholars to regard the ''Robot'' stories as more like "the Scandinavian sagas or the Greek legends" than a unified whole.<ref>Gunn (1982), pp. 77–8.</ref>

Indeed, Asimov describes "—That Thou Art Mindful of Him" and "Bicentennial Man" as two opposite, parallel futures for robots that obviate the Three Laws as robots come to consider themselves to be humans: one portraying this in a positive light with a robot joining human society, one portraying this in a negative light with robots supplanting humans.<ref name="TCRBicentennial">{{cite book |last=Asimov |first=Isaac|title=The Complete Robot|year=1982|publisher=Nightfall, Inc. |author-link=Isaac Asimov|page=658|chapter=The Bicentennial Man}}</ref> Both are to be considered alternatives to the possibility of a robot society that continues to be driven by the Three Laws as portrayed in the ''Foundation'' series.{{According to whom|date=December 2010}} In [[The Positronic Man]], the novelization of [[The Bicentennial Man]], Asimov and his co-writer [[Robert Silverberg]] imply that in the future where Andrew Martin exists his influence causes humanity to abandon the idea of independent, sentient humanlike robots entirely, creating an utterly different future from that of ''Foundation''.{{According to whom|date=December 2010}}

In ''[[Lucky Starr and the Rings of Saturn]]'', a novel unrelated to the ''Robot'' series but featuring robots programmed with the Three Laws, John Bigman Jones is almost killed by a Sirian robot on orders of its master. The society of Sirius is eugenically bred to be uniformly tall and similar in appearance, and as such, said master is able to convince the robot that the much shorter Bigman, is, in fact, not a human being.

====Definition of "robot"====
As noted in "The Fifth Law of Robotics" by [[Nikola Kesarovski]], "A robot must know it is a robot": it is presumed that a robot has a definition of the term or a means to apply it to its own actions. Kesarovski played with this idea in writing about a robot that could kill a human being because it did not understand that it was a robot, and therefore did not apply the Laws of Robotics to its actions.