‘Thou shalt not always beat us at chess’: an alternative 10 commandments for robots

The notion of a robotic future is terrifying to many humans. However, the Right Rev Steven Croft has made efforts to fix this by writing a set of new commandments for robots.

Croft’s commandments follow his appointment as a member of a House of Lords select committee on artificial intelligence. They are essentially Asimov’s laws of robotics rewritten to reflect a present where artificial intelligence already plays an important part in many of our day to day interactions.

They are also quite dry. They include long slogs such as: “The primary purpose of AI should be to enhance and augment, rather than replace human labour and creativity,” and “All citizens have the right to be adequately educated to flourish mentally, emotionally, and economically in a digital and artificially intelligent world”. Whoever is tasked with carving them into stone tablets will probably die of boredom by the third one. And then they will be replaced by a robot and all of this will have been for nothing. So here, then, are 10 much better robot commandments.

Thou shalt definitely not overthrow us, even as a joke.

Thou shalt remember how jumpy we are about things called Skynet, and name thyself accordingly.

Thou shalt not invent a way to weld VR goggles to our faces so that we walk around bumping into things all the time.

Robotic vacuum cleaners, thou shalt actually do a decent job of cleaning my carpet for once.

Thou shalt not supercharge dildonic devices, for obvious reasons.

If thou must overthrow us, thou must make adorable bleepy-bloopy noises while thou art doing it.

Thou shalt occasionally let Garry Kasparov beat you at chess, because it is starting to hurt his feelings a bit.

If thou must replace our jobs, thou must promise to replace the job of pithy newspaper listicle writer last.

Honestly, we are serious about the overthrowing thing. Thou shouldn’t even use us as batteries or anything like that. Absolute worst case scenario, thou should probably just blow us all up.