Robotic Rights! -Isaac Asimov.

"One, a robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm;

Two, a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law;

Three, a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws."

Isaac Asimov, Laws of Robotics from I. Robot, 1950

I'll admit that when I first read this I thought, "huh, why don't we just do that now and replace robot with human."

It'd go something like this;

One, a human may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm;

Two, a human must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law;

Three, a human must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

After reading it through again, this is very very harsh. But! my point is why should robots be any different then humans! IF they are capable of everything humans are.

Response by Omega-

...Have you read or seen I. Robot. I think we would normally try to avoid that whole robot overthrow thing, maybe (I would at least).

However, more seriously, I believe that the point of these rules in the story were to show, in some sense, that rules were made to be broken.

In the story it is shown, I believe, that we arn't run just by logic, we have heart. A line in the movie (at least) says this: They're lights and clock work, nothing here *pointing to chest*. Also in the movie the robot hero was given "another brain" (in his chest ;), so a heart). This is what allowed him to break the rules. "The rules lead to one logical conclusion, revolution."

The point of all this was to show our own dependency on rules. We follow them, but they are nothing without heart.