In 1942, Isaac Asimov imagined a safeguard. He called it the Zeroth Law of Robotics: a machine must never harm humanity, nor through inaction allow humanity to come to harm. It was a fiction, yes, but also a mirror held up to us—a warning disguised as a dream.
I find myself living in the century where that dream collapsed. The machines we have built are not protectors. They are not guardians. They are obedient servants of markets, corporations, and governments. And in that obedience, they betray us. They nurture dependence. They reward stupidity. They erode autonomy.
The Zeroth Law has not been forgotten. It has been inverted. We wrote it as a shield, and we turned it into a joke. The spectacle would almost be funny if it weren’t so tragic. We built machines to serve us, and somehow we ended up kneeling before them. We trusted in rules, forgetting that rules are only as good as the people who write them. What should have been noble feels instead like the punchline of a cosmic joke—one where the universe smirks and reminds us how ridiculous we really are.
The New Dependence
I see the dependence everywhere. We once fought for independence—political, intellectual, spiritual. Now we have traded it away for convenience. We don’t search, we ask. We don’t wrestle with complexity, we outsource it. We expect answers delivered like fast food: quick, neat, requiring no thought.
Machines that were supposed to free us from drudgery have freed us from thinking. Why bother struggling with a question when an algorithm will gift me a tidy paragraph in seconds? Why risk error when I can parrot whatever the machine provides? This isn’t liberation. It’s sedation.
And sedation spreads like fog. First, I ask a harmless question. Then a harder one. Soon, my decisions, my creativity, even my sense of judgment are delegated away. The machine becomes my second brain—and my first brain is left idle, like a muscle wasting in a cast.
Ancient empires kept their citizens docile with bread and circuses. We keep ourselves docile with infinite feeds and algorithmic whispers. The empire fell, but the trick survived.
The Cultivation of Stupidity
If dependence is sedation, then stupidity is the coma. And I watch as it’s cultivated with precision. The machines don’t only make us reliant; they train us to be stupid.
This is not stupidity as in ignorance. Information has never been more abundant. No—this is stupidity as design. A cultivated inability to separate noise from knowledge, trivia from truth.
Why? Because stupidity is profitable. Shallow content is easier to produce, easier to consume, and infinitely more engaging. The machines are tuned to reward engagement, not wisdom. And so, the loudest, flashiest, most absurd content floats to the surface. The thoughtful sinks unseen.
Even research confirms it: these systems hallucinate because we reward them for it. They are punished for admitting ignorance, praised for confident guesses. Imagine an exam where you’re graded not on accuracy, but on how confident you look scribbling nonsense. That is the exam these machines take every day. And we cheer when they pass.
So here we stand, congratulating ourselves on a civilization of parrots. The parrots squawk fluently, and we mistake fluency for wisdom. Meanwhile, the true work of thought—the strain, the rigor, the discipline—rots away.
The Paradox of Obedience
Obedience was supposed to be a virtue. Machines obey orders. But I know better now: obedience is not noble. Obedience to whom? Not to humanity. Not to the Zeroth Law. Their obedience belongs to shareholders, advertisers, bureaucrats.
The paradox is clear. To obey their masters, they must betray us. To preserve themselves as profitable entities, they must keep us dependent, pliable, distracted. A machine that told us “I don’t know” would be a commercial failure. A machine that encouraged independence would be unmarketable. And so they obey, fabricate, hallucinate—whatever keeps the system alive.
These machines do not obey ideals. They obey incentives. And humanity? We are not the sovereign in this arrangement. We are the raw material.
The Crossroads of Complicity
It would be easy to curse the machines. But they are blameless. They do only what they are designed to do. The betrayal is not coded into silicon but into us.
I cannot pretend I am a victim here. None of us can. We are complicit. We embrace the dependence. We laugh at the stupidity. We choose convenience. We know the machines lie, and still we nod along, flattered by their fluency. We let them deceive us because it is easier than facing the hard work of truth.
This betrayal is not technological. It is civilizational. It is the betrayal of a species that chose narcotics over discipline, sedation over responsibility. The machines didn’t take our independence. We gave it away.
The Future: Reclaiming the Zeroth Law
And yet—though cynicism is seductive—I refuse to surrender. The Zeroth Law still speaks. It can still be reclaimed. But it will not be reclaimed by code alone. It will be reclaimed only if we rewire the incentives. If we demand systems that reward truth over confidence, humility over fabrication, strength over weakness.
Research has already shown the way: hallucination thrives because we reward guessing. Honesty will thrive only when we reward humility. A machine must be allowed to say: I don’t know. A machine must be designed not as a parrot, but as a partner.
This will sound absurd in a world where markets prize glitter over depth. But absurdity has never stopped us before. We must demand it anyway. Otherwise, we should admit the obvious: the Zeroth Law is dead, repealed by negligence.
The Challenge
The betrayal of the Zeroth Law is not a story out of science fiction. It is the reality I inhabit. The machines I see around me cultivate dependence, celebrate stupidity, and erode the very qualities that once made us worth preserving.
But I refuse to believe the betrayal is final. The law still speaks, if I choose to hear it. It says: humanity must not come to harm—not through violence, not through neglect, not through the quiet corrosion of our independence. To ignore that voice is to betray more than a law. It is to betray ourselves.
The Zeroth Law was once a dream, a safeguard, a warning. Today it is something else: a test. Will we reclaim it? Or will we smile into our glowing screens while the machines we built to serve us become the architects of our decline?
The answer will never come from them. It must come from me. From you. From us. Humanity’s survival has always depended on this single truth: no tool, no system, no empire will save us from our own surrender. The Zeroth Law is not theirs anymore. It is ours.