Titanic & the 3 Laws of Robotics

[azimerthemad]

Okay, I'm running "A Night to Remember" from GURPS Time Travel Adventures for my DW: AiTS group next, and here's the conundrum.

1) Next session, the TARDIS crew goes to the Titanic and gets stuck between the Time Agents (who in my game are also the agency Homeline from GURPS Time Travel) and Stopwatch/Centrum from GURPS Time Travel/Alternate Earths 2, two rival organizations trying to save different passengers to protect their separate versions of history.

2) One of the players is a GURPS "Transhuman Space"-era 22nd century mining robot (Yes I'm using a lot of GURPS!). He has the three laws written in.

3) Another player just pointed out that he will be in a situation where they have to protect the continuity of the timeline and yet CRY-AX the 'bot is programmed to allow NO HUMAN TO COME TO HARM.

Any suggestions on how I can handle this logically without massive paradox? Or, at the very least, just interestingly?

[da professor]

Perhaps the people saved who don't have post-Titanic roles in the preferred timeline could be shipped, by Tardis, to somewhere were they will not be able to affect history.

[rev503]

Personally I'd start by putting GURPS back on the shelf I think your writing yourself into a corner with these characters and situations
buut
1) Does the robots parameters allow for temporal shifts (ie does his definition of human mean alive at his own time)? if so..no problem the original crew of the Titanic aren't counted

2) How far along is it's positronic (tm) brain - I seem to recall an Asimov short story where they built an advanced robot that could apply the laws based on relative worth - if your robots got that ability then it will understand the potential chaos unleashed by saving someone who shouldn't be saved and not try it.

3) I seem to recall a similar story where the robot essentially rebooted becasue so many people were dying that it couldn't resolve the three laws into any action (there wasn't a thing it could do that didn't result in a human dying so it just kept trying to calculate different actions) - End result, robot essentially blue screened until the situation resolved.

4) Let the robot save em all and dump them into a time spur

5) If the robot has some escape in it's laws due to temporal continuity, give it a list of survivors so it knows who should survive

Remember the three laws at their most basic are VERY absolute - I'm surprised the player actually has a playable character in that setting.

[azimerthemad]

We had a similar incident in Troy where he leaped over the walls to stop the fighting. THat time he was ordered elsewhere by his "Master" on the crew.

This is from a player who doesn't generally take that active a role in the game, so he's okay with the 3 Laws. And he suggested them, oddly enough!

Thanks for the philosophical suggestions. These will help.

[Craig Oxbrow]

As I said over on RPGnet:

How well is he programmed?

Will he go into a feedback loop and smoke comes out of his ears? That might be an appropriate solution and could also be funny, but it'd sideline the player until someone reboots the character.

Or could he be told, quite fairly, that all these people were dead centuries before his construction so technically only the safety of people in his era, threatened by changes in the timeline, matter? Although this could lead to him becoming Ruthlessly Pragmatic (often a worse kind of evil than Evil when PCs start doing it) in such matters.

If I were his player I'd (a) go along with narrative tricks for keeping him away from the issue by having him be elsewhere when it comes up and (b) take the situations on a case-by-case basis. And (c) encourage the other players to grab the character and pull him back as he charges in to save people he can't save, or be willing to go "does not compute" and KO the character as above.

Because for me this is a logic problem with the Three Laws which might slow down a Doctor Who adventure which sounds like it'd be entertaining without it. So see what the player thinks. Donna being confronted with the Doctor's inability to save the people in The Fires Of Pompeii is the dramatic point of the story, while this sounds like you and CRY-AX's player worrying that you hadn't thought of this implication and wondering what to do about it. "Don't bring it up" is a reasonable response, I think.

[Curufea]

The whole point of Asimov's three laws was to provide the author a basis for him to work around in his short stories that introduce the concept.
I don't remember Asimov's laws being used in the Titanic episode - but you could put them in there if you like.

The biggest flaw in the laws (at least the one exploited in the movie of I Robot, but also in the Foundation book series) is the expansion of concept. When robots stop looking at individual humans, but look at humanity as a whole. For the Greater Good is a catch cry for a multitude of evil. Where the end justifies the means.

[JohnK]

Hullo, azimerthemad,

Apr 11, 2010 2:23:32 GMT azimerthemad said:

Okay, I'm running "A Night to Remember" from GURPS Time Travel Adventures for my DW: AiTS group next, and here's the conundrum.

1) Next session, the TARDIS crew goes to the Titanic and gets stuck between the Time Agents (who in my game are also the agency Homeline from GURPS Time Travel) and Stopwatch/Centrum from GURPS Time Travel/Alternate Earths 2, two rival organizations trying to save different passengers to protect their separate versions of history.

So far, so good.

Apr 11, 2010 2:23:32 GMT azimerthemad said:

2) One of the players is a GURPS "Transhuman Space"-era 22nd century mining robot (Yes I'm using a lot of GURPS!). He has the three laws written in.

3) Another player just pointed out that he will be in a situation where they have to protect the continuity of the timeline and yet CRY-AX the 'bot is programmed to allow NO HUMAN TO COME TO HARM.

Any suggestions on how I can handle this logically without massive paradox? Or, at the very least, just interestingly?

Well, right off the bat, I can see your problem... you're using too much GURPS stuff!

That said, the problem is really simple to me. The Three Laws pertain to humans, but only individual humans, and it was the addition of the Fourth Law in one of the books (can't remember which one, Mind Like A Sieve (MLAS(tm), you know) that dealt with humanity as a whole that is going to cause you problems in this regard.

My personal advice would be to not have the character deal with this matter, preferably by not being present when the issue of saving the timeline comes up. The Three Laws are a one trick pony that wilI be good for an adventure or two, but after that will cause problems in a DW: AiTaS game.

[themyth]

Apr 11, 2010 2:23:32 GMT azimerthemad said:

Okay, I'm running "A Night to Remember" from GURPS Time Travel Adventures for my DW: AiTS group next, and here's the conundrum.

1) Next session, the TARDIS crew goes to the Titanic and gets stuck between the Time Agents (who in my game are also the agency Homeline from GURPS Time Travel) and Stopwatch/Centrum from GURPS Time Travel/Alternate Earths 2, two rival organizations trying to save different passengers to protect their separate versions of history.

2) One of the players is a GURPS "Transhuman Space"-era 22nd century mining robot (Yes I'm using a lot of GURPS!). He has the three laws written in.

3) Another player just pointed out that he will be in a situation where they have to protect the continuity of the timeline and yet CRY-AX the 'bot is programmed to allow NO HUMAN TO COME TO HARM.

Any suggestions on how I can handle this logically without massive paradox? Or, at the very least, just interestingly?

So, the robot character has traveled in a TARDIS, right?

So, maybe the TARDIS re-wrote its programming telepathically, just like it wriggles inside everyone's minds for linguistic purposes.

The Laws of Time always trump Asimov.

[azimerthemad]

Results!

1) Robot pretends to be chef.
2) Robot serves Captain's table dinner
3) Getting info on guests from databanks, robot learns of the iceberg.
4) Robot rushes to spotters
5) Robot stopped by NPC 9th Doctor (He said he was there in "End of the World")
6) 9th Doc gets robot to help him fight 51st Warlord ally of Magnus Greel from Talons of Weng Chiang.
7) Robot seeks off during eventual chaos, evacuates most of 3 class passengers into TARDIS.
8) PC Doctor realizes that the majority of 3rd class perishes (90% of children) and are unidentified, 600 bodies never found, helps evacuation, starts thinking of planets and time periods to drop them off.

The robot stayed true to his principles, and ALL the advice given helped me prepare. Thanks everybody!

[gmjake]

yeah, in the movie I, robot the robots calculated the best chance of survival of the person and made the decision on that.