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Written in the Sand
Episode 4: A Bit of a Break
Hello again and welcome to Written in the Sand. I am Patrick Anthony. It's going to be a lot shorter than other episodes have been so far, which is actually nice as far as the muscles I use for speech are concerned. Last episode I started to slur words after the umpteenth recording.

I happen to have an interesting news announcement relevant to our last episode, and it thankfully came after I posted the episode, sometimes the real world steals my idea before I’ve even written them down, which is just annoying, but I have a theory on that which I'll explain some time.

So, a European parliamentary committee has drafted a proposal regarding robots that I found very interesting. I'm linking the article on the resources so you can read it yourself but the main gist is a recognition of rights for artificial intelligence should it ever come and also a recommendation to implement Asimov's zeroth law. I'm really hoping that's how the word is pronounced. My dictation program recognized it, so I'm fairly confident, but given some of the words it thinks I say, you never know.

I actually didn't cover that law in our last episode. It was one attempt by Asimov to try and cover the gaps in the laws of robotics. The law is almost identical to the first law accept it substitutes the word humanity rather than referring to a single human. It is called zeroth law because it is meant to come before and take precedence over all the other laws. It still isn't a perfect law, but I find it interesting that a real world legal body has started to use the language of Asimov's laws in establishing actual legal precedents.

In other news I'm going to take a bit of a break from the subject matter this time around to go over a few things, including why I'm doing that.
continued in podcast...

RESOURCES
One lonely link to a cool article about robotic law