When Isaac Asimov wrote his three laws of robotics in the 1940s, he was writing science fiction. But the problems he was trying to solve — how do you govern a powerful, non-human intelligence so it serves people rather than harms them — turned out to be more foresight than fiction. Most of us know those laws from the Will Smith movie I, Robot: a robot may not harm a human being, a robot must obey orders given by humans, and a robot must protect itself. They were Asimov’s attempt to build guardrails into something that, without them, could go badly wrong.