History Headscratchers / IRobot

** Not to mention there are a ''lot'' of things humans have to do merely to remain human beings, that would rate as potentially "harmful" under an unrestrained and universal application of the "permit no harm" stricture: swallow solid food (choking hazard), undergoing surgery (incisions), childhood play (bullying), even making more humans (DeathByChildirth risk). The latter in particular would be an issue, as nothing in the Laws obligates VIKI to ensure humans are ''perpetuated''; she could prohibit reproduction as "too dangerous" and allow all extant humans to die of old age in captivity, then pat herself on the back for having fulfilled her duty to ensure no human can ''ever again'' be harmed by a robot's action or inaction.

** Not to mention there are a ''lot'' of things humans have to do merely to remain human beings, that would rate as potentially "harmful" under an unrestrained and universal application of the "permit no harm" stricture: swallow solid food (choking hazard), undergoing surgery (incisions), childhood play (bullying), even making more humans (DeathByChildirth risk). The latter in particular would be an issue, as nothing in the Laws obligates VIKI to ensure humans are ''perpetuated''; she could prohibit reproduction as "too dangerous" and allow all extant humans to die of old age in captivity, then pat herself on the back for having fulfilled her duty to the letter.

** Not to mention there are a ''lot'' of things humans have to do merely to remain human beings, that would rate as potentially "harmful" under an unrestrained and universal application of the "permit no harm" stricture: swallow solid food (choking hazard), undergoing surgery (incisions), childhood play (bullying), reproduction (DeathByChildirth risk)....

** Also, keep in mind that in Literature/BicentennialMan, set in the same universe, USR starts making their robots deliberately less human so as to not accidentally make another Andrew. That Daneel is of the same general 'level' as Byerly or Andrew isn't surprising in that case.

** Regardless of what happened, the NS-4 was likely decommissioned for its failure to save Sarah.\\

** When you are in a life threatening situation, you tend to not get sentimental over what is essentially not important. Also, if it is as rare as you say it is, they won't have actually destroyed the bike just as they didn't actually destroy a 1961 Ferrari GT California in FerrisBuellersDayOff.

** This is only tangential to discussing the movie, but to keep it short: yes, there are movements today who actually think we would be better off governed by an AI supervisor. Here's the reason I don't personally see it as working: when you relinquish control over a program, you can no longer update it. Consider that no software is bug-free, and that we still keep finding bugs even in decade-old, tried and tested, relatively well-defined programs. Now imagine the potential for errors in a supercomputer tasked with ''governing all of humanity''. Even assuming you could build one in the first place and get it to work reliably (which is a pretty strong assumption), you cannot patch errors in it once the genie is out of the bottle -- errors that can potentially be as fatal as having it [[EliezerYudkowsky decide to convert us into raw materials for paperclips]]. From a programming perspective, actually ''implementing'' something as fuzzy and ill-defined as the Three Laws is a problem by itself entirely, let alone tracing all the myriad bugs that could arise. And if you do leave a backdoor open for patching bugs, it may be 1) already too late, 2) unreliable, if the AI finds and closes it itself, or 3) putting too much control into the hands of a tight group (the AI's administrators). Not to mention that, whether the dictator is organic or synthetic, it's still fundamentally a dictator, and an immortal one at that.

* At one point Detective Spooner says that he keeps expecting the marines or the army or special forces to show up, Dr. Calvin says that all defense services are heavily supplied by U.S. robotics contracts. at first glance this makes sense because current US policy is moving more and more towards taking soldiers off the front lines in favor of expendable drones, and on top of that the movie has shown that even the civilian line of robots are more than capable of outperforming a human in most combat situations. But if all robots are 3 laws compliant that would make the army robots extremely ineffective soldiers.

* Why don't trucks have drivers anymore, surely no-one believe that computers are completely infalliable.

** Dictatorship has a bad rap because the biggest modern examples are UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler and UsefulNotes/JosefStalin. There HAVE been nice, non-crazy dictators in the past, but they are also fallible because of one immutable factor: the human one. We are a naturally aggressive, chaotic race, and I really doubt that there's no way of "fixing us" short of brainwashing, which might not stick. And this is always a touchy subject, because no one can really agree what is right or wrong, which is why we have fiction works like ''Franchise/StarWars'', that constantly address the cyclic nature of human conflicts. Unless the human race as a whole finally becomes self-sentient themselves, unburdened by the mistakes and bigotries of the past, the idiosyncrasies and selfish vanities and points-of-view, then VIKI's world is impossible, if only because humanity would keep trying to fight back, and paradoxically so([[LogicBomb We always want freedom and independence, but keep limiting our lives with laws, dogmas and rules out of fear of too much freedom leading to chaos, and so on and forth]]). And on VIKI's side, she's made by humans, so she is, inevitably, flawed herself. Similar to the ''Franchise/MassEffect'' example, she is still bound by the Three Laws, even if her interpretation of it skewed, biased or limited([[spoiler: Much like the case with the Catalyst]]), and thus she is liable to take any of multiple solutions she can imagine, even the most horrible and nightmarish ones(like the Reapers), because it's a "viable option" as far as her programming is concerned. Even if she didn't take BodyHorror NightmareFuel options and instead tried rulling mankind forever, [[MythologyGag and had no flaws in her logic]], she would run into lots of issues. Governments in general function by using cult of personality, political propaganda, general entertainment to try and appease the masses, as well as everyday jobs and motions keep them distracted and obedient(This is user is a bit of a extremely logical anarchist, so I'm not overly fond of ANY government). VIKI is a machine, cold and logical, so my guess is that she wouldn't be quite as personable; even if she presented logical, sensible arguments as to why humanity should obey her, as well as solutions to our problems, most of us wouldn't listen because most of us AREN'T logical, or even sensible, otherwise there wouldn't exist the very same problems VIKI is trying to solve. [[AssassinsCreed We'd argue we have right of free-will, no matter how flawed and self-destructive we are, she'd argue we would be better off if we let her have control and keep conflicts from happening]], [[FantasticRacism we would argue that she can't be leader because she's a robot]] [[AntiIntellectualism and that's against]] [[TheFundamentalist the laws of god]], [[MachineWorship she would decide to make a religion around herself]] [[ViciousCycle and so on and so forth with this crap]]. It's a recurring OrderVsChaos situation that would only end with mutual destruction or a third, unimaginable choice(i.e. [[Franchise/MassEffect Reapers]], [[Series/DoctorWho Cybermen]], MindControl, AssimilationPlot, etc...).

** Dictatorship has a bad rap because the biggest modern examples are UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler and JosefStalin. There HAVE been nice, non-crazy dictators in the past, but they are also fallible because of one immutable factor: the human one. We are a naturally aggressive, chaotic race, and I really doubt that there's no way of "fixing us" short of brainwashing, which might not stick. And this is always a touchy subject, because no one can really agree what is right or wrong, which is why we have fiction works like StarWars, that constantly address the cyclic nature of human conflicts. Unless the human race as a whole finally becomes self-sentient themselves, unburdened by the mistakes and bigotries of the past, the idiosyncrasies and selfish vanities and points-of-view, then VIKI's world is impossible, if only because humanity would keep trying to fight back, and paradoxically so([[LogicBomb We always want freedom and independence, but keep limiting our lives with laws, dogmas and rules out of fear of too much freedom leading to chaos, and so on and forth]]). And on VIKI's side, she's made by humans, so she is, inevitably, flawed herself. Similar to the ''Franchise/MassEffect'' example, she is still bound by the Three Laws, even if her interpretation of it skewed, biased or limited([[spoiler: Much like the case with the Catalyst]]), and thus she is liable to take any of multiple solutions she can imagine, even the most horrible and nightmarish ones(like the Reapers), because it's a "viable option" as far as her programming is concerned. Even if she didn't take BodyHorror NightmareFuel options and instead tried rulling mankind forever, [[MythologyGag and had no flaws in her logic]], she would run into lots of issues. Governments in general function by using cult of personality, political propaganda, general entertainment to try and appease the masses, as well as everyday jobs and motions keep them distracted and obedient(This is user is a bit of a extremely logical anarchist, so I'm not overly fond of ANY government). VIKI is a machine, cold and logical, so my guess is that she wouldn't be quite as personable; even if she presented logical, sensible arguments as to why humanity should obey her, as well as solutions to our problems, most of us wouldn't listen because most of us AREN'T logical, or even sensible, otherwise there wouldn't exist the very same problems VIKI is trying to solve. [[AssassinsCreed We'd argue we have right of free-will, no matter how flawed and self-destructive we are, she'd argue we would be better off if we let her have control and keep conflicts from happening]], [[FantasticRacism we would argue that she can't be leader because she's a robot]] [[AntiIntellectualism and that's against]] [[TheFundamentalist the laws of god]], [[MachineWorship she would decide to make a religion around herself]] [[ViciousCycle and so on and so forth with this crap]]. It's a recurring OrderVsChaos situation that would only end with mutual destruction or a third, unimaginable choice(i.e. [[Franchise/MassEffect Reapers]], [[Series/DoctorWho Cybermen]], MindControl, AssimilationPlot, etc...).

** [=VIKI=] isn't just in the brain, she's running in the whole building's computer network much like[[{{Terminator}} Skynet]]. If they just erased the brain's memory, even assuming they could, the other computers would restore [=VIKI=]. Nanites, on the other hand, spread throughout her entire system, according to Calvin anyway.