Selected work / 2016
The First Law
A robot turns a familiar rule of science fiction into a question about responsibility.
About the work
The First Law is a robot that makes an unpredictable decision about whether to prick an approaching person with a needle. It confronts the prohibition against harming humans in Isaac Asimov’s fictional laws of robotics.
The work distinguishes the robot’s decision from a mechanism with a fixed response or a machine operated by a person. Its deliberately small act of injury raises questions about responsibility, agency, and how people respond when a machine is allowed to choose.
