Asimov's Laws

The possibility of developing truly intelligent machines, and their potential to be friend or foe to humanity, gets the Hollywood treatment in a new blockbuster film I, Robot, which opens in the US on Friday.

At the heart of the movie are Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics", invented as a simple, but immutable moral code for robots See below. The film's plot revolves around an apparent breaking of the laws, when a robot is suspected of murdering a famous scientist.

Yet, while the movie is an enjoyable action romp, robotics and artificial intelligence experts admit they are a long way from having to worry about such rules yet. "The difficulty is building something that would understand them," says Alan Bundy, at Edinburgh University's Artificial Intelligence Institute in the UK. "That is well beyond the state of the art at the moment."