[Sharlin]

The burden of proof is obviously on anyone who wants to argue that the three laws are, in fact, a good solid framework for robot ethics. It's pretty astonishing that the three laws are taken by anyone as being some sort of canonical default framework.

Asimov was not in the "try to come with a good framework for robot ethics" business. He was in the business of trying to come up with some simple, intuitive idea that didn't require the readers to have a degree in ethics and that was broken and vague enough to have a plenty of counterexamples to make stories about.

In short, Asimov absolutely did not propose his framework as an actually workable one, any more than, say, Atwood proposed the Gilead as a workable framework for society. They were nothing but story premises that the consequences of which the respective authors wanted to explore.

[qualeed]

>The burden of proof is [...]

Sometimes we can just talk about things without having to pretend we're in a court of law or defending our phd thesis.

Original commenter wasn't asking for anyone to prove anything, or trying to prove anything themselves. They just observed that some conversations are hand-waved away.

[Sharlin]

Given the total vagueness of the three laws idea and how Asimov came up with the idea because he wanted something easily broken to be used as a plot device, the perfectly reasonable stance is to not take them seriously a priori. Anyone is totally within their rights to think about them more and present for discussion some more solid ethical framework based on them. But I'd rather AI ethicists focused on frameworks that had some finite probability of actually working.

Given that we've been thinking about ethics for thousands of years, and haven't really made much progress, I think it's pretty clear that anything that can be condensed into three sentences is not a workable model.