Vrftsjtryk

The robots in Asimov's works generally don't have the 'mental' sophistication needed to look ahead for abstract harm in the manner you suggest. For them, the 'inaction' clause must mean the robot cannot allow imminent harm - i.e they must act to prevent harm when they see the harm about to happen. Such events generally don't occur as humans go about their daily lives, so by and large robots would let humans carry on (while serving them, of course).

By the time robots become sophisticated enough to forecast possible harm in the manner you suggest, they have also become sophisticated enough to understand that the restraints you suggest themselves constitute a kind of harm, so the 'action' clause here would counteract the 'inaction' clause [here the 'action' clause would be stronger, as it involves actions actually to be taken, contrasted with merely possible harms that need not occur]. They also would understand that things like biting one's own tongue are inherently unavoidable so they wouldn't try to prevent such harm (though of course it would 'pain' them when it actually happens). By the time we get to Daneel and his 'Zeroth Law' robots, they additionally understand that restraining all individual human beings constitutes harm to humanity; this, incidentally, is why robots eventually disappear - they come to realize that having humanity rely on them is itself harmful, so the best they can do is let humanity manage its own fate [at least overtly].

My understanding of it was that the typical Three Laws robot interpreted the First Law to mean "Nor, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm right here and now when the robot is within sight of him and can tell what's obviously about to happen if the robot does not choose to interfere." That's different from locking up the human today just because it is theoretically possible that he might suffer some sort of accidental injury or infection or other misfortune tomorrow. (Or at some much later date.)

To put it another way: Near as I can recall, on those occasions when we saw a robot refuse to comply with an order to go away and leave the human alone to do whatever he was currently doing, that usually meant the Second Law was being subordinated to the First Law because of the robot's perception of immediate danger to a fragile human body. But if such immediate danger was not present, then the Second Law required the robot to turn around and go away whenever instructed to do so. The solid fact of "The Second Law applies to this order I am receiving right now" overrode anything so abstract as "But if I leave today, a First Law problem involving physical harm might arise tomorrow . . . or the day after . . . or at some later date . . . who knows?"

So if some robot tried to lock everyone up for their own good, the Second Law could be invoked by ordering the robot to forget the whole silly idea.

Since you don't specify that you are requesting an "in universe" reason ... I think it's important to remember that the three laws are just a story device. Asimov (wisely) is quite vague about how they are implemented, as he is about many technical details. And "I should just lock all the humans in a padded cell for their safety" would result in a rather limited storyline.

Now, in universe, there are many "judgment calls" inherent in applying the three laws (and in fact the inherent ambiguities often result in important plot elements for the stories). The robots apparently have to appeal to their own programming instead of an external authority to resolve these ambiguities.

But I think we have to logically assume that the more obvious judgment calls (like, say, should I just lock all the humans in a padded cell immediately for their safety?) were already addressed in development and testing of the robots, or they never would have been put in general use or production at all.

In other words, the designers of the robots, in addition to addressing whatever other bugs they had to address (e.g. hmm, if the human is dead it can't suffer), would have simply programmed safeguards against that sort of result.

Kind of a frame challenge - is locking a human in a padded cell preventing them from harm? If you're going to allow the abstract possibility of future arm as motivation for a robot to use the 1st law to lock humans up, it should be noted that taking away a humans freedom is generally causing them harm to some extent in the form of psychological damage - and the mental state of humans has been considered by robots as eligible for 1st law protection in at least some of Asimovs stories.

Simply put, the definition of 'harm'.

Protection from physical harm can cause other kinds of harm. In some cases, protection from some form of harm can actually increase the likelihood of that type of harm in the future.

For example, protection from emotional harm can leave a person incapable of dealing with trivial challenges without severe emotional harm, which can propagate to actual mental harm, which can further propagate into harm to one's general health, which obviously compromises one's physical safety.

In the end, for a robot to be able to make determinations with regard to intervention in the full spectrum of human events, it must be capable of making a non-deterministic estimate of probable outcomes of a range of potential actions (including inaction), and be able to make not only objective determinations of probability and severity of harm, but also estimates of the subjective PERCEPTION of various types of harm. It must be able to do this continuously in real time as well.

Because of the complexity of problem, the simplest way to mitigate it is to restrict the problem domain by restricting the capabilities and responsibilities of the robot.

If a robot is designed to control the opening and closing of a sliding door, software can be defined which can make very reliable estimates of the potential outcomes of its actions because its actions are limited to either opening the door, or closing the door.

However, if our doorman robot is watching and listening to everything, and trying to parse everything going on around it, it may not be able to reliably determine whether it should open or close the door, given the totality of the situation. For example, if a couple are in an argument, and one of them gets up to storm out of the room, should the robot open the door, or would it be best to keep them in the room to solve their dispute? Is this person a danger to themselves or others if they leave? Will the other one be a danger to them if they stay? how will all of this affect their relationship? Will opening the door cause social harm because of the appearance of the person attempting to leave compared with the social norms and apparent prejudices of those on the other side of the door who would witness the event?

You can further restrict the problem domain by restricting the inputs. So now our robo-doorman can only perceive that a person is approaching the door, and can determine the point at which if the door is not opened, the person is likely to come to physical harm, based on their velocity and the properties of the door. Sure, the robot may not be very much help in saving a relationship, but it will predictably be able to keep you from walking into the doors like William Shatner in a Star Trek blooper.

All of this means that the robots must either be able to approach or exceed our capacity for what we call 'thought', or it must be limited to the extend that its shortcomings are less than its strengths. If neither is possible, then that task is probably better left to a human.

Zeroth law.

A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm

If all the humans are locked in padded cells there isn't much procreation taking place. Ergo, the human race dies out.

Contrary to some other answers, I believe robot thinking is sophisticated enough to deal with future harm, just not to deal with hypothetical harm. A human may bite his tongue, stub his toe, whatever but it's not definite harm so doesn't require action to prevent it from happening.

Don't forget that - on realisation that the race would (not might) stagnate following the initial colonisation of the solar system and subsequent politics - they nuked (or allowed to be nuked) the planet.

Since the "merger" of the Robot universe and the Foundation universe reveals that robots manipulated and dominated human history for thousands of years, in a very real sense the galaxy is their padded room and most of Asimov's works in this "unified universe" takes place inside that padded room.

We just can't see the walls.