Science Fiction

Artificial intelligence is a dream of mankind, but it is also an elusive one. Science has created machines that can emulate certain human thought processes at high speed, but these machines cannot really be said to think. In fiction, however, the problems involved can be solved, and robots have been presented in fiction which are very human in the way they think. However, even as human beings in the real world seek to develop machines that can think, it is also apparent that these same human beings fear such machines. In fiction, this is often addressed by the development of rules for the conduct of robots and androids, and yet often these rules can be bent quite far by the intelligent machines at which the rules are directed. Isaac Asimov created perhaps the most famous set of such rules in his Three Laws of robotics, logical rules that the author uses to show the concerns of humankind and the ways those concerns might be addressed. In the film Blade Runner, based on a story by Philip K. Dick, the rules are built into the machine itself, perhaps because the machine is organic, an android which lives by biological processes rather than as a set of man-made circuits. What the androids share with the robots is the essential truth that none of them are truly human because they were not born, though they can all be human in a philosophical sense because they can think and feel.

The three laws as set forth by Asimov are that 1) a robot may not injure a human being or all

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es have created. The human inventors have included rules to protect themselves, given the greater strength and endurance of the robots. If the robots turned on their inventors, as in the Frankenstein story, the humans would be at a disadvantage. Therefore, the humans implant the three laws and so at first may believe they have addressed all problems. As these stories show, however, they have not, and the laws themselves created logical conflicts in different circumstances and could lead to disasters if ways are not found to use logic to impose an answer. Humans are the ones who are capable of the advanced and free thought necessary to arrive at such answers, while it is the minimal thinking ability of the robots that causes them to break down in the face of conflicts among the three laws. In the film Blade Runner, the intent is to examine the question of what it means to be a human being, and the filmmakers undertake this goal by developing contrasts between human beings on the one hand and the replicants on the other, with the filmmakers shifting audience identification from one to the other at different times as the issue is explored. The strength of the replicants becomes a two-edged sword, for instance, first pointing

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