If you haven't read them yet, I would suggest Isaac Asimov's Robot series, which discusses the implications of hardware-level 'laws' to which robots must abide.

If you haven't read them yet, I would suggest Isaac Asimov's Robot series, which discusses the implications of hardware-level 'laws' to which robots must abide. His take was that these laws would constrain behavior according to human judgments of harm and benefit. I wonder if there is another way of looking at it, one where AI action is not only constrained by human sensibility, but informed by it.