WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Eden, now streaming on Netflix.
Netflix's Eden features a world ruled by robots. In this world, one of the cardinal rules for the machines is that they cannot kill humans -- directly or indirectly. It's all due to past developers centuries ago being unable to create robots that would harm humans. Robots must also be able to maintain themselves and cooperate, and any machine that can't meet these requirements must cease to function.
However, as Season 1 rolls on, when you reconcile these rules with the first major one -- i.e. the no-kill policy -- things quickly start to unravel.
The policy feels flexible as we discover the truth about Zero, the robot leader who doesn't want mankind reawakening from their sleep pods as he thinks they'll poison the world of Eden again. Instead, he believes machines can farm the land and create peace and order that'll last millennia, ergo why he, as Dr. Fields, decided to transfer his consciousness into Zero's shell.
Yet early on, he sends out drones that almost kill the human protagonist Sara as they hunt her down. They don't want the last human alive starting a movement, but they should be trying to keep her alive. When the legion does capture her, it gets even worse because rather than imprisoning or placing her into stasis, Zero almost murders her by throwing her into a bio-cauldron to melt. But this defeats the main rule and leaves us wondering if he's resistant to it, given he was once a human.
But in Eden's finale, we see that's not the case -- even Zero has to obey it. However, it gets murky because while in his giant mech fighter, he battles Sara in her own titan machine. He shouldn't be attacking it, though, as he's aware a human is inside it. Zero rationalizes it as wanting to destroy the mech, but this explanation could only fly had he not known Sara was inside.
Zero is fully aware Sara is in the cockpit, therefore he is violating the rule by indirectly putting her in harm's way. It's a grey line that kills the emotional resonance off once he eventually saves her from his minion bots to garner redemption. Still, all this is undercut since it's so convenient for him to bend the rule he helped design and once had to abide by. The fact that he's also keen on eradicating humans from the onset -- by keeping them in stasis -- also contradicts his programming, as he knows they could still die down in the Earth.
Eden should have found another workaround for this. Zero possibly hacking the algorithm as an ex-human would have made sense -- that way he could have controlled both bot and machine. More so, it would've addressed his past, making amends in his own twisted way after losing his wife and daughter to a planet filled with violence and disease.
