To Asimov, those three laws and the terrestrial limits clearly seemed inevitable. The idea of building a powerful machine without such safeguards was madness. In the actual world, no such prohibitions have been passed, by anyone, anywhere.

Beginning in the fifties, automation progressed quickly, and the number of industrial robots increased apace while research into artificial intelligence, a term coined in 1955 to describe efforts to endow machines with something akin to human reasoning, grew far more slowly: its advances emerged only now and again, like cicadas. That pattern changed in 2022, when ChatGPT was released into the world, after which everything sped up like a movie on fast-forward, and robots spread like locusts.

By 2025, there was more bot traffic on the internet than human traffic. Androids could come to outnumber humans in the real world, too. Last year, Morgan Stanley estimated that thirteen million androids could be in use by 2035 and more than a billion by 2050. These would include domestic robots: perhaps cooks, tutors, babysitters, maids, gardeners, physical therapists, playmates, elder companions, sex workers. A recent Bank of America study forecast as many as three billion androids on the planet by 2060, most used not in factories but in homes. Earlier this year, Tesla announced that it expects its Optimus robot, branded as an “autonomous assistant, humanoid friend,” to be sold commercially by the end of 2027. “I think everyone on Earth is going to have one and is going to want one,” Elon Musk said.

What most people know about robots, which isn’t much, comes from science fiction. This is also true of bots, which may be one reason they keep acting like the robots in science fiction. Even though people have been waiting for the robot takeover for more than a century, governments seem woefully unprepared for the coming of the androids by the millions or by the billions. They were certainly unprepared for the bots that, even without bodies, have upended economies and societies and wrought considerable epistemological, philosophical, social, and especially legal chaos. The arrival of the robots will only compound these problems.

ChatGPT had its moment in 2022; some futurists say that the robot moment will occur as soon as 2027. (Roboticists appear more doubtful.) Whenever they come, the new bots will have bodies. What will it mean to be human in this world? No one knows. Futurists herald the imminent arrival of abundance, prosperity, and limitless joy and, equally, joblessness and purposelessness, never quite wrestling with the contradiction between those forecasts. Time seems to be flying by. How should humanity prepare? There is no time to prepare. Ought there to be rules? There is no time to make them. Or is there?

Robots are outlaws for two reasons. First, the law takes its time in responding to new technologies, figuring that new tools can be accommodated within existing ideas, rules, and doctrines. A harm is a harm, copyright is copyright, fraud is fraud. By this logic, a locomotive is just like a horse, only faster; e-mail is just like mail, only faster; a large language model is merely a superfast search engine. Hence, no new laws are needed. Second, since the regulation-busting Reagan era, corporations have amassed unmatched political and economic power, and have convinced legislators that regulation stifles growth and innovation, a view promoted by Milton Friedman-informed think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation, which were eager to roll back the environmental standards set in the sixties and seventies. This belief found full-throated expression among early internet boosters, who insisted that the web exists beyond the reach of the law. “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us,” the Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow wrote in “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” in 1996. “They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.”