The playful fallacy of the three laws: Essay on artificial intelligence, society and the difficult problem of conscience

The objective of this essay is to reflect critically on the condition of our most modern artificial intelligence systems, their latent potentials, their technical possibilities useful to society, and also on their intrinsic structural limitations, extrapolating hypotheses about the hard problem of consciousness and its dreamed of overcoming, speculating also about the possible interactions of these supposedly conscious and superintelligent systems with contemporary societies of today and tomorrow, and their possible undesirable consequences for the very social bodies involved in these - to a large extent - disruptive relationships. To do so, we will use Isaac Asimov's infamous “three laws of robotics” as a theoretical object, in order to demonstrate the unlikely fragility of such a fictional hypothesis, when confronted with factual reality and also with the current state of the art in artificial intelligence and systems computational. Furthermore, even though the hard problem of consciousness in cyber-informational systems remains unchanged in its persistent insolubility, it is not difficult to imagine robots with different levels and degrees of intelligence interacting with humans in the most diverse sectors and environments of everyday social life, as it actually begins to happen, and the subsequent consequences and social developments. That is why it is very difficult to believe that mere playful “three laws”, originating from science fiction, could be a sufficient and satisfactory instrument to face issues involving human beings and inorganic systems endowed with artificial intelligence (AI).