Judgement after Automation Posthumanist Reflections on Asimov’s Laws of Robotics

Contemporary concerns about artificial intelligence often turn on the philosophical question: What is human about judgement? To understand the premise of this popular imaginary, we turn our attention to Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, a set of laws deployed within his science fiction stories to create narratives about the relationships between humans and machines. Asimov’s laws reflect a shared imaginary regarding the relationship between humans and technology that permeates beyond the realm of science fiction, shaping some of the basic assumptions behind our definitions of politics, humanity, and freedom.

Interpreting the stories Runaround (1942), Risk (1955), The Bicentennial Man (1976), and Foundation and Earth (1986) through Immanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of judgement, we pinpoint that the philosophical arcs of these stories are written in the tension concerning who (or what) is capable of both determinative and reflective judgement. Then, following theorists who have interpreted Asimov’s “Zeroth Law” through the lens of posthumanism, we argue that Asimov’s laws are constrained by the conception of reflective judgement as being inherently anthropocentric and limited to closed systems. In contrast, we advance the argument that reflective judgement emerges only through distributed and contingent systems — systems that include humans and non-humans.

What should keep our attention then, is not the existential anxiety over an autonomous artificial intelligence that challenges human superiority, but the politics of creating and maintaining technical systems capable of sustaining distributed forms of reflective judgement.