"In 2012, Ryan Calo and Michael Froomkin -- law professors at the Universities of Washington and Miami respectively -- sensed that robots were at approximately the stage of the internet circa 1988, and began to think about how to preemptively create good policy about them. Where, they asked, were the legal conflicts going to be? What new laws will be needed, what existing laws can be adapted, what metaphors will apply? When police question your robot butler, is that covered by the First, Fourth, or Fifth Amendment? Is it more like searching your filing cabinet or interrogating your spouse? If computer diagnostics become statistically more often correct than doctors, at what point do doctors using their own judgement become guilty of malpractice?
A stitch in time
At the root of such speculations is a single main question: how can we avoid spending 25 years arguing and rearguing the same points over and over again because an apparently small but wrong decision at the beginning creates havoc when the technology scales up to billions?
Robot Law, edited by Calo, Froomkin, and University of Ottawa professor Ian Kerr, is a collection of academic legal papers, largely drawn from the first four annual We Robot conferences, which they launched in 2012 to inspire scholarship to consider and suggest solutions for the likely areas of legal conflict."