Psychohistory, the science of historical motivation, combines the insights of psychotherapy with the research methodology of the social sciences to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present. Then there is http://www.worldwatch.org/ and data collections which allows "putting the world on the couch"...

According to Asimov's 0th laws of robotics in §0, the ultimate ethical consideration,  a robot (a man-made solution) may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. Then §1,2,3 are reframed to lie within §0. As Asimov's 20,000 year old 4-Law Robot Daneel Olivaw explained: “The Zeroth Law is a corollary of the First Law, for how can a human being best be kept from injury, if not by ensuring that human society in general is protected and kept functioning?”

In fact §0 should bring humanity away from ever faster changing trends in in the direction of sustainable lifefulfilling growth: And yet, because of the ongoing "success" of the prevailing system#2, not even at its abyss, where the surviving people are faced with "politically correct" suffering do they become alive again in mourning over the thus lost ones and the damage...

Most people have become unaware and mindless like unconscious animals on their way to the slaughter house for the qualitatively far greater sufferings of inhibited lifefulfillment. Thus "fulfillment" in post-modern times has become the perfect denial of the truth about the state of the human systems we are part of. This the state of mind, science has set out to overcame, management to tangibly improve its danger, and marketing to disseminate the possible progress! In short, we have come full circle merely on a technologically higher and more globalized level!

Based on general performance it seems humans are nothing but recursive, yet self aware, introspective, conscious machines. To counter the wave of unease, even terror, irrational but all-pervasive fear of such, in itself, self-destructive machine like human behavior, Isaac Asimov, the late Sci-fi writer and scientist invented the Three Laws of Robotics. Since it is not politically correct to impose solutions on humans, Asimov imposed his laws on robots which in the end became his solution for humanity.

The intellect is quick to notice the lack of consistency and the virtual inapplicability of Asimov's three laws in robotic terms. But how about as a necessity for man-made solutions?

Admittedly they can not be negated, but they are not sufficient. First, applied to robots by Asimov, they do not reflect any coherent worldview or background. To be properly implemented technically and to avoid their interpretation in a potentially dangerous manner the robots in which they are embedded would have to be equipped with a reasonably full model of human systems in their physical and human spheres of existence.

Devoid of such contexts, Asimov's laws just as the corresponding intellect, soon lead to intractable paradoxes (experienced as nervous breakdown of Asimov’s robots). Conflicts are ruinous in automata based on recursive functions (Turing machines), as all robots are. Godel pointed at one such self destructive paradox even in the "Principia Mathematica", ostensibly a comprehensive and self consistent logical system. It was enough to discredit the whole magnificent edifice of sumptuous science#1 constructed by Russel and Whitehead over a decade. That is where post-normal science#0 got wind of the chance to usurp its dominance in science.

Some will argue against this and say that robots/the intellect need not be an automata in the classical, Church-Turing, sense. That it could act according to heuristic, probabilistic rules of decision making. There are many other types of functions (non-recursive) that can be incorporated in a robot, they will say. True, but then, how can one guarantee the robot's fully predictable behavior and the intellect's desirable convergence in society? How can one be certain that the intellectual robots, e.g. mental operating systems will fully and always implement the three necessary laws §1-3? Only recursive systems are predictable in principle up to the point where their complexity and theirs required to handle it, makes them incomprehensible.

1. An immediate question springs to mind: HOW will a robot/man-made system identify a human being? There are two ways to settle this very practical issue:

Both present additional difficulties. Sigmund Freud said that we have an uncanny reaction to the inanimate. This is probably because we know that with our pretensions, traumas and layers of philosophizing  we are nothing but recursive, self aware, introspective, conscious machines. Special machines, or mental viruses no doubt, but machines all the same.

The second law of robotics will prevent the robot from identifying themselves as humans; unlike the prevailing intellect which pretends to be the measure in the humanities! Robots will surely have to be able to identify the like, say a computer another in a network. But a §1/§2-robot must be capable of making a §1-non-coercive, non-intrusive and devoid of communication or with very limited communication, binary selection. It will classify one type of physical entities as robots – all the others, he will group into "non-robots" and among them, beyond monkeys and parrots, humans to obey to.

Moreover, the capability to apply such a test would make a robot human in many important respects. A human knows other humans for what they are; it takes one to know one, the saying rightly goes. Let us assume that by some miraculous way the problem is overcome and robots unfailingly identify humans.

2. The next question pertains to the notion of "injury" in §1. Is it limited only to physical injury? Should it encompass the no less serious mental, verbal and social injuries (after all, they are all known to have physical side effects which are, at times, no less severe than direct physical "injuries")? Is an insult an injury? What about being grossly impolite, or psychologically abusive? Or offending religious sensitivities, being politically incorrect - are these injuries?

Practically all human actions actually offend someone, or have the potential to do so, or seem to be doing so. Consider surgery, driving a car, or investing money in the stock exchange. These "innocuous" acts may end in coma, an accident, or a stock exchange crash respectively. Should a robot refuse to obey human instructions which embody a potential to injure said instruction-givers? Which level of risk should trigger the refusal program? At which stage of collaboration should it be activated? Should a robot refuse to bring a stool to a person who intends to commit suicide by hanging himself? Should he ignore an instruction to push someone off a cliff (definitely), help him climb the cliff (less assuredly so), get to the cliff (maybe so), get to his car in order to drive him to the cliff...

Where do the responsibility and obeisance bucks stop?

Whatever the answer, one thing is clear: a robot must be equipped with more than a rudimentary sense of judgment, with the ability to appraise and analyze complex situations, to predict the future and to base his decisions on very fuzzy algorithms (no programmer can foresee all possible circumstances). To most people such robot/arguments towards solutions sounds much more dangerous than any machine ar weapon they know which do not behave in accordance with §1-3.
 

3. Moreover, what, exactly, constitutes "inaction"? How can we set apart inaction from failed action or, worse, from an action which failed by design, intentionally? If a human is in danger and the robot tries to save him and fails – how will we be able to determine to what extent it exerted itself and did everything it could do?

4. How much of the responsibility for the inaction or partial action or failed action should be attributed to the manufacturer – and how much imputed to the robot itself? When a robot decides finally to ignore its own programming – how are we to gain information regarding this momentous event? Outside appearances can hardly be expected to help us distinguish a rebellious robot from a lackadaisical one.

5. The situation gets much more complicated when we consider states of conflict. Imagine that a robot is obliged to hurt one human in order to prevent him from hurting another. The Laws are absolutely inadequate in this case unless the robot either establish an empirical hierarchy of injuries and/or an empirical hierarchy of humans. Should we, as humans, rely on robots or on their manufacturers (however wise, moral and compassionate) to make such selection for us? Should we abide by their judgment – which injury is the more serious and warrants an intervention?
    

One of the possible solutions, the one Asimov pursued in his psychohistory is

In short §1-3 are irreducibly necessary and in their insufficiency lead to §0, which upon globalization in turn reveals that human systems, beginning with the intellect and the resulting collective systems#2, are in themselves  always closed and thereby self-destructive.

§0 in this world