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The Three Laws of Robotics are fictional rules Isaac Asimov devised for robots in his stories. They put preventing harm to people first, human orders second, and a robot’s own survival third. Each rule is subordinate to the one before it, and the laws are a literary device—not a real-world robotics standard or a guarantee that machines will behave safely.
What are the Three Laws of Robotics?
In Asimov’s fictional setting, robots are governed by three rules, in order of priority:
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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 those orders would conflict with the First Law.
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A robot must protect its own existence, as long as that protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
The hierarchy matters: preventing harm to a person overrides obedience, and both override a robot’s self-preservation. Asimov’s stories use that structure to explore how robots might interpret the rules when circumstances are ambiguous or the laws pull in different directions.
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Who came up with the laws, and when?
Science-fiction author Isaac Asimov devised the rules. “Runaround” is the first story to state all three explicitly; it appeared in the March 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and was later collected in I, Robot (1950). Asimov recalled naming them in a talk transcribed in The Impact of Science on Society: “I called it the ‘Three Laws of Robotics.’”
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov collects “Runaround,” the story that first states the three rules together.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Are the Three Laws real rules for robots?
No. They are rules within Asimov’s fiction, not actual regulations, a universal engineering standard, or safeguards automatically built into deployed robots. Asimov distinguished the positronic-brain robots in his stories from industrial robots of his time, which relied on external safety systems.
The stories sometimes attribute the laws to a fictional “Handbook of Robotics, 56th edition, 2058 A.D.” That is part of the story framework, not a real handbook. Real-world robot safety depends on the design, application, and safeguards of a particular system; the Three Laws do not establish that a machine is safe.
What is the Zeroth Law?
Asimov later added a fictional Zeroth Law, which concerns preventing harm to humanity as a whole. In that later framework it takes precedence over the original three. It is an extension, not one of the original Three Laws, and shifts the focus from individual people to humanity collectively.
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