"We can’t be sure what Brieant was thinking when he ordered poor Walter killed (Brieant died in 2008), but a new legal analysis by Ryan Calo, an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law, has found that there have been a whole litany of cases involving robots. Upsettingly, many decisions involving robots suggest American judges have a fundamental lack of understanding about what robots are and how they function.
“Judges seem to aggressively understand a robot to be something without discretion, a machine that is programmed and does exactly what it’s told,” Calo told me. “Courts don’t have their minds around the differences between people and robots.”
Call details this disconnect time and time again in the paper, “Robots in American Law.” He and his assistant researchers combed through thousands of cases where the word “robot” (or similar words like artificial intelligence) were mentioned and selected nine cases that demonstrated particularly confounding or interesting decisions by the judge."