Could revisiting Asimov’s laws help us avoid AI’s ‘Chernobyl moment’?

https://theconversation.com/could-revisiting-asimovs-laws-help-us-avoid-ais-chernobyl-moment-278744

Publish Date: 2026-04-09 07:15:00

The conflict in Iran – but also the war in Ukraine – show not only that AI is radically changing the economics of war (which may be good news), but also that we may be heading towards some kind of “Chernobyl moment”. We may soon experience a disaster that will force us to belatedly realise we should have drawn up some shared rules to govern a technological development that we ourselves triggered.

Even Dario Amodei, the founder of AI company Anthropic, who seems passionate about taking action to prevent Armageddon, acknowledges that he doesn’t have the answer we desperately need.

One of the most interesting attempts to regulate the use of artificial intelligence may have been the one drafted during the second world war by a PhD student at Columbia University who was then temporarily employed by the US Navy. His name was Isaac Asimov, and in his early short story Runaround (1941), he postulated three laws that are still surprisingly inspiring for anyone thinking about how to solve the intellectual and political problem that is AI in warfare.

Unlike recent attempts by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) and the EU to draw up regulations, Asimov’s laws are admirably concise. They state that a robot (what we now call an “artificially intelligent agent”) shall never harm a human being (or allow harm to happen through inaction. It shall always obey the orders given by humans unless they conflict with the first prohibition. And it will always protect its existence unless this conflicts with the first and second provisions.

In his story, Asimov himself shows how the three laws can create internal contradictions, leading to paralysis. And yet, Asimov’s three principles can still be useful as a starting point for the strategy we now need.