In I, Robot, the first in a series of books Isaac Asimov wrote about robots and their relations with human kind, he outlines three "laws of robotics", which were built into the robots' positronic brains:
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A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
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A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
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A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
These laws—particularly the first one—were necessary to protect humans from the robots, which were much more powerful than flesh and blood.
Asimov's solution even guards against one person or group of people using a robot against someone else.
Obviously, humanity would have been incredibly stupid to build artificial people who were stronger than we were, and virtually impossible to punish, without some such built in safeguard.
But of course this is science fiction—no artificial humans exist, at least none we need worry about, not in America.
Except, I've been thinking—about corporations, which are, legally, artificial people.
They are all around us, have millions of times more power than Asimov's robots, and we are so used to them that we don't even notice.
They can do almost anything that you and I can do—hold property, sue, hire people, keep bank accounts, donate to political campaigns—but they have huge advantages that we do not.
They can't be thrown in jail. In fact, they are difficult to punish at all. Any punishment which would seriously threaten a corporation also threatens all the employees of that corporation—innocent people, who act as a kind of shield.
Besides, they feel no pain, so punishment has little effect.
They live forever, which means they can take as long as they want to accumulate wealth. And, because they have no emotions, they also have no loyalty.
A case in point is the recent rash of corporate changes in retirement benefits. The fact that there are employees who invested their lives on behalf a corporation, in the belief that the corporation would take care of them in retirement, means nothing.
We're dealing with robots, artificial people, that are a danger to human beings.
America has been warned about this countless times—by James Madison, by Thomas Jefferson, by Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower.
We really need a First Law.
At least, that's what I think today.
