The Three Laws of Robotics in Popular Culture - Movies and Television

Movies and Television

• The long-running British SF television show Doctor Who featured a four-part serial in 1977 titled "The Robots of Death". The titular robots were controlled by three laws, taken almost verbatim from Asimov. The story plays out much like the Elijah Baley mysteries, in which a murder has been committed, and a robot seems to have been directly or indirectly involved (contrary to the requirements of three-law programming).

• In the 1984 movie Repo Man, the character Bud talks about the "Repo Code", a parody of the Three Laws. "I shall not cause harm to any vehicle nor the personal contents thereof. Nor through inaction let that vehicle or the personal contents thereof come to harm..." The character J. Frank Parnell in the movie also resembles Asimov.

• In the 1987 film RoboCop, the cyborg police officer had been programmed to follow four prime directives which guided and limited his actions—though not always in a positive manner.

1. Serve the public trust
2. Protect the innocent
3. Uphold the law
4. Classified (eventually revealed to be "Any attempt to arrest a senior OCP officer results in shutdown")

• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Measure of a Man (Star Trek: The Next Generation)", which aired on 13 February 1989, Lieutenant Commander Data, an android, has his sentience and, consequently, his rights as an individual, challenged. Throughout the run of this series, Data is identified as a positronic android, and Asimov is even mentioned by name in the episode "Datalore". While Data routinely references his "ethical subroutines", indicating some sort of moral guide, it is unclear whether Data is explicitly bound by the Three Laws. For example, the episode "Clues" explored Data's capacity to lie to the crew in order to protect them from aliens, and the episode "The Most Toys" explored Data's supposed inability to murder in cold blood.

• In the Simpsons episode "I, D'oh-Bot", which first aired 11 January 2004, Professor Frink builds a robot which obeys the First Law (and presumably the other two, although they do not directly come into play).

• The 2009 anime series (released in 2010 as a film) Time of Eve is based heavily around the applications of these rules to androids, which are frequently discussed by the characters. The series explores out some various interpretations of the laws (such as what it means to allow a human to come to harm), and various loopholes that lead to one or more laws being broken under certain circumstances.

• In 1999's Bicentennial Man, the theatrical version of Asimov's novella of the same name, Andrew Martin, the android played by Robin Williams, presents the Three Laws to its new family using a holographic display emanating from a projector in its head.

• The 2004 theatrical version of I, Robot explores at length the Three Laws.

• In the episode "Phoenix Rising" of Babylon 5, Alfred Bester telepathically programs Garibaldi, a human, with a variation of Asimov's laws of robotics, preventing Garibaldi from harming Bester.

• In the episode "The Fuzzy Boots Corollary" of The Big Bang Theory, Wolowitz, Sheldon, and Raj discuss the possibility that Sheldon is a robot by questioning his history of following Asimov's laws of robotics. (Interestingly they skip the discussion of the "Second Law" even though it may have ended their deliberations since Sheldon does not have a history of following orders.) Despite being formulated in the 1950s, and despite remaining largely unimplemented by most workers in the field of artificial intelligence and robotics, this reference demonstrates that the Three Laws continue to influence and hold sway over a wide variety of intellectual descendants of Asimov.

• In the second season of the 1979 Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, the two major robots in the series, Twiki and Crichton, cited the Three Laws when reactivated after repairs. Additionally they quoted a brief history of the laws' origin.

• In the 2009 adaptation of Astro Boy, every robot must obey them, save Zog, who existed 50 years before the rules were mandatory in every robot.

• In the episode "The Clotharian Contamination Protocol" of The Middleman, the Middlman cited the First Law to a rogue robot. The rogue version of Ida replied "Kiss my Asimov."