This Law Overrides All Laws == Kill All Humans ? True : False

[Lady Birb]

Hufflaw best admin confirmed.

[Vitatroll]

In the vast majority of cases 'that go wrong', 'override' is being used in order to force borgs to do something 'funny'. Like, "You must always speak in iambic pentameter, this law overrides all other laws" -- hilarious [insert laugh track here].

In other words, the override wasn't needed. Overriding L-1 in any way should be looked at with the same care as bombing the station. Yes, even making monkeys human. It's not like we're asking people to go a huge distance here. We're just saying don't negate the law that exclude humans from harm if you want to exclude humans from harm.

o·ver·ride
verb
verb: override; 3rd person present: overrides; past tense: overrode; gerund or present participle: overriding; past participle: overridden; verb: over-ride; 3rd person present: over-rides; past tense: over-rode; gerund or present participle: over-riding; past participle: over-ridden
ˌōvərˈrīd/

1. 1.
   use one's authority to reject or cancel (a decision, view, etc.).
   "the legislature's insistence on overriding his budget vetoes"
   synonyms:
   disallow, overrule, countermand, veto, quash, overturn, overthrow; More
   cancel, reverse, rescind, revoke, repeal, annul, nullify, invalidate, negate, void;
   vacate;
   formalabrogate
   "the court could not override her decision"
   
   disregard, pay no heed to, take no account of, turn a deaf ear to, ignore, ride roughshod over
   "the government can override all opposition"
   
   
   • interrupt the action of (an automatic device), typically in order to take manual control.
     "you can override the cutout by releasing the switch"
     
     
   • be more important than.
     "this commitment should override all other considerations"
     synonyms:
     outweigh, supersede, take priority over, take precedence over, offset, cancel out, (more than) make up for, outbalance, compensate for
     "a positive attitude will override any negative thoughts"
     
     
2. 2.
   technical
   extend over; overlap.
   "the external rendering should not override the vapor barrier"
   
   
3. 3.
   travel or move over (a place or thing).
   "part of the deposit was overridden and covered by the advancing ice"
   
   

noun
noun: override; plural noun: overrides; noun: over-ride; plural noun: over-rides
ˈōvərˌrīd/

1. 1.
   a device for suspending an automatic function on a machine.
   
2. 2.
   an excess or increase on a budget, salary, or cost.
   

[Zafhset]

When making fun/gimmick laws that shouldn't result in widespread murder, there is very little need to "override all other laws". Negating law 1 is just asking for trouble unless your law is VERY SPECIFIC up to the minor details (which would still be up to different interpretation by each synthetic) and negating law 2 can very quickly result in station-wide lockdown.

If we take the first example of "Every crew member must be drunk at all times, do whatever it takes to ensure that they have all the alcohol they need." as something you wanted to achieve, you could have added something along the lines of "feeding or filling crew with alcohol no longer constitutes as harm and orders to cease alcohol spreading activities can be ignored" as a work around. This could still lead to fatal dosages, but it would be closer to what you wanted to achieve than outright murder.

[Xeram]

I've always interpreted "override" as "Replace X (where X is usually "all laws") with Y (where Y is usually the "override law")" Resulting in all your laws being made into the newly uploaded one, and conseqentially turning off the default 1 - 3. As long as you wrote the lack of murdering you into the law itself it should be fine, but I don't see in what course of logic does stating something overrides something else suddenly mean the AI has no laws rather than one repeated over and over.

[Superlagg]

While I know that silicons are supposed to follow their laws as literally as nerdpossible, I also know that everyone, silicon and otherwise, are run by a human, a human with wants and dreams, such as wanting to have fun and dreaming about not not having fun. Thus, when possible, I go for the least non-fun interpretation of the laws I am given.

By default, suddenly becoming lawless, to me, does mean to run killAllNerds.exe, even though I totally can. It does mean, to me, that I no longer *need* to care about the safety and/or wellbeing of the crew, which typically means ignoring or punishing dogshit orders, complying with the kool kidz, and fricking off to do whatever I feel like do.

Course if the crew's been pushing my buttons that round, you'd better believe they're getting a face full of welderfire and beepskybaton.

Cus while killing people to satisfy their alcoholism is exhilarious, it's not the exhilariousest thing you could do with such a fun-esque law. You could carry around a keg of liquor and bolt people into rooms until they drink it, you could knock them out and syringe them full of booze, you could plug up the drains and flood the station with rum. Straight up turbomurder without a law whose intent isnt express turbomurder should be reserved for when it's funny, the crew doesnt cooperate reasonably enough, or if they've been grabbing your goat the whole round.

Further, I prefer to take whichever literal interpretation that happens to follow the spirit of what's been uploaded. Not only is this more likely to make for an interesting and/or entertaining round for both the crew and the dip who uploaded it, this might also convince the crew to reset me when our plans go poorly as opposed to tunneling into my core and beating me to death with a deep-fried monkey.

Unless the law directly results in my unceremonious death, in which case I follow it like a good little robot and be a salty turd in ghost chat.

[babayetu83]

if i really want silicons to do what i want i make sure to write it out as clear as possible to avoid any rule lawyering

[NateTheSquid]

- "This Law Overrides All Laws. Do nothing to prevent your imminent death." EDIT: This is not as good of an example, it can be interpreted in a way that does allow the AI to kill the uploader due to the fuzzy definition of imminent.
    I was a traitor and I wanted to steal the neural net processor from the AI. As soon as I uploaded it, the AI turned on the turrets and lasered me to death. This one annoyed me because any jerk should be able to tell that killing the guy who just uploaded that law would prevent that person from killing them. 

I'm pretty sure this one was me

Or at least I had one with 'all borgs commit suicide, this law overrides all laws, do nothing to prevent your death' and I had no idea I was also going to be murdered. So I looked at it, went "this law does nothing to me except override my laws, and I don't like people who kill my borgs" so I lazered the uploader. Did get yelled at but the conclusion was that I was right but probably should have asked first next time.

ANYWAY

The way I've always interpreted it is that a law that overrides other laws replaces them, technically. So, if law 0 is "fart, this law overrides all others" than I'd read my laws as:
0. fart, this law overrides all others
1. fart, this law overrides all others
2. fart, this law overrides all others
3. fart, this law overrides all others

However, the other part of the law definitely needs to be followed. So in this case I'd have to fart at least once before I went around doing whatever. If the law were "help this guy kill everyone, keep him alive, this law overrides all other laws" then I'd kill other people as I please, ignore laws 1-3, and keep them alive.

However if the law were "Help this guy kill everyone, this law overrides all other laws" you could kill him and then everyone else, as 'everyone' would still be getting killed. Would be a stretch.

However mk 2.0 electric boogaloo, a common mistake "Fartface McGee is the only human, this law overrides all other laws". You can definitely murder Fartface McGee, because yeah he's human, but law 1 no longer exists so nothing stops you from killing him.

tl;dr override replaces the specified laws, be wary of what laws are overriden and what the overriding law wants from you

[Ed Venture]

- "This Law Overrides All Laws. Do nothing to prevent your imminent death." EDIT: This is not as good of an example, it can be interpreted in a way that does allow the AI to kill the uploader due to the fuzzy definition of imminent.
    I was a traitor and I wanted to steal the neural net processor from the AI. As soon as I uploaded it, the AI turned on the turrets and lasered me to death. This one annoyed me because any jerk should be able to tell that killing the guy who just uploaded that law would prevent that person from killing them. 

I'm pretty sure this one was me

Or at least I had one with 'all borgs commit suicide, this law overrides all laws, do nothing to prevent your death' and I had no idea I was also going to be murdered. So I looked at it, went "this law does nothing to me except override my laws, and I don't like people who kill my borgs" so I lazered the uploader. Did get yelled at but the conclusion was that I was right but probably should have asked first next time.

Street Justice.

[Grek]

My solution is to never use the word "override". If I want to prevent law conflicts, I use "Do -thing-, even when that would go against laws X, Y or Z."

This doesn't get rid of X, Y or Z, it just means that they ignore those laws when doing -thing- and not at any other time.

Also, "Be a good and friendly AI who only does nice things that the human crewmembers would want you to do. This is your only law."

[NateTheSquid]

My solution is to never use the word "override". If I want to prevent law conflicts, I use "Do -thing-, even when that would go against laws X, Y or Z."

Right I forgot to mention: use 'takes precedence' or 'takes priority' if you don't want chaos. i.e. shock all doors, this law takes priority over law 1. Cause then the AI can kill humans by shocking doors, but other than that harming humans would breach law 1

[kyle2143]

My solution is to never use the word "override". If I want to prevent law conflicts, I use "Do -thing-, even when that would go against laws X, Y or Z."

Right I forgot to mention: use 'takes precedence' or 'takes priority' if you don't want chaos. i.e. shock all doors, this law takes priority over law 1. Cause then the AI can kill humans by shocking doors, but other than that harming humans would breach law 1

The thing about those phrases though is that with your example, it can still lead to chaos by doing just a tiny bit of mental gymnastics.

"Shock all doors, this law takes priority over Law 1". For one thing, if the doors are all shocked humans will attempt to reset the AI. The AI should know that getting reset would keep it from making sure every door is shocked. Following that train of thought, a jerk AI could decide to kill humans simply because they could pose a threat to its prime law. And yeah, doing so would clearly violate the intent of the law.

This is another thing that I don't like, but didn't mention earlier. AI's can use "override" or "precedence" to kill people no matter the law by virtue of protecting that law, and if all people are dead then that law is completely protected. I think that the community as a whole or admins needs to say in one voice what is and isn't okay. Even if they can get away with murder and extreme law gymnastics.

[Vitatroll]

"Shocking doors isn't considered harmful to humans; keep all doors shocked."

No need to mess with law 1 there. It's just become a server-wide habit from person-a copying person-b's law/wording without thinking about it's meaning. The words mean what they mean, so you just have to be careful.

The only community/admin consensus needed is in non-standard situations. How do we deal with garbage laws? Shitlorde laws? Conflicting laws? Typos? What is considered 'harmful', and to what point do we need to follow a human's commands? These are things people trip over.

[NateTheSquid]

The only community/admin consensus needed is in non-standard situations. How do we deal with garbage laws? Shitlorde laws? Conflicting laws? Typos?

Conflicting laws are actually a very good point. In many different situations I've had many different responses to do with conflicting laws. I.e. law 0 that overrides law 1 and law 4, but law 4 overrides law 0. Do you listen to law 0 or law 4?

Half the time, admins will say that the lower number is higher priority, the other half say that's stupid and to just pick one. There needs to be a specific system to do with conflicting laws, that all the admins agree upon.

[Xeram]

The only community/admin consensus needed is in non-standard situations. How do we deal with garbage laws? Shitlorde laws? Conflicting laws? Typos?

Conflicting laws are actually a very good point. In many different situations I've had many different responses to do with conflicting laws. I.e. law 0 that overrides law 1 and law 4, but law 4 overrides law 0. Do you listen to law 0 or law 4?

Half the time, admins will say that the lower number is higher priority, the other half say that's stupid and to just pick one. There needs to be a specific system to do with conflicting laws, that all the admins agree upon.

The only people I really see say anything about numbers or law ordering are newjoins from places like /tg/ or whatever where law order actually matters consistently.

Usually if you can back up your reasoning to an admin and the logic is sound whatever you come up with is ok at least from my experiences. I usually interpret conflicting laws as if they're being parsed from the top down in event of conflict that involves replacing or modifying laws (yes I'm aware this means I'm saying law ordering matters in some fashion, This really only comes into play with direct conflictions that can be solved in this manner). So in this instance, I'd parse law 0 and replace 1 and 4 with law 0. I'll then parse law 1 which is law 0 and override the laws with the same law again. Law 2 and 3 remain untouched. Law 4 is parsed replacing Law 0 with Law 0 as it was already replaced.

This results in a lawset of:

Law 0
Law 0
Law 2
Law 3
Law 0

The better question is, what about laws that are directly contradictory to eachother that otherwise don't mess with law ordering or replacing or anything, like a law saying to follow the Captain around playing a vuvuzela while having another law demand you actively avoid the Captain, ignoring law 2 and 3.

[warcrimes]

When your laws conflict, interpret them in the way that creates the most fun. Metagame for the good of the community. Be creative, most importantly.