In the March 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, the writer Isaac Asimov published the short story “Runaround.” It is listed in the issue’s table of contents under Short Stories beginning on page 94. The story is the first place where Asimov stated, in full and as an explicit code, his Three Laws of Robotics.
The laws form a strict hierarchy. The First Law forbids a robot from harming a human being or, through inaction, allowing a human to come to harm. The Second Law requires a robot to obey human orders except where that would conflict with the First Law. The Third Law requires a robot to protect its own existence except where that would conflict with the first two laws. In “Runaround” the plot turns on a robot caught in a conflict between the Second and Third Laws, which is exactly the kind of edge case the rules were written to expose.
Asimov framed the laws as built in safety constraints, presented in his fiction as fundamental to the design of every robot’s “positronic” brain. The idea that an autonomous machine should operate under fixed, prioritized rules to keep humans safe has outlived its science fiction origins. It is now a common reference point in discussions of AI safety and alignment, even though modern systems are not actually governed by anything as simple as three sentences. The primary source used here is the original 1942 magazine scan held by the Internet Archive.