Here's the flaw in Asimov's Three Laws that has nothing to do with robots: they're a ranked list of absolutes. Try that in the real world and it breaks.

Two posts ago I said Asimov saw the need for a framework. Last post, I reflected that honesty was missing from his framework. Now the hard part — what a real one might look like.

Start with what won't work. The Three Laws are strictly ranked: rule one always beats rule two, which always beats rule three. Clean, teachable, and exactly why his robots kept surprising their makers. Real decisions aren't a strict hierarchy. They're competing priorities you have to weigh — helpfulness against honesty, safety against autonomy, caution against speed. Any framework that declares "this value always wins" will eventually produce something absurd, and that was Asimov's point all along.

So, a workable framework probably isn't a numbered list at all. It's a set of principles held in tension, applied with judgment, by a system humble enough to know it can be wrong about which one should win in a given case. Honesty is one. So are helpfulness, harm-avoidance, and respect for a person's right to make their own decisions. None of them gets to be an absolute priority.

But here's what I keep returning to, and it's the part most relevant to your business:

A framework that lives entirely inside the machine puts all the weight on getting the machine right. That's a mistake. The real framework is distributed — partly how the system is built, partly how your people are trained to use it, partly the policies and judgment your organization brings. Asimov put it all in the robots' heads because that made for good stories. In a real company, it can't live in only one place, and it can’t just live with the technology.

The distributed part is where it gets real for a business — because "distributed" means someone has to own each piece, and most companies have only thought about one piece. That's where I want to go next.