The Three Laws of Robotics are a set of rules Isaac Asimov devised for the robots in his fiction. A robot may not injure a human or, through inaction, allow one to come to harm. It must obey human orders unless they conflict with the first law. It must protect its own existence unless that conflicts with the first two. Asimov introduced them in his 1942 short story Runaround, and they were collected in his 1950 book I, Robot. Later he added a Zeroth Law, which places humanity as a whole above any single human. The laws became a shared vocabulary for thinking about machine ethics, even though Asimov used them mainly to generate story plots about their loopholes.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.