Stanford CIS

Should We Have Laws to Control Robots Before They Control Us?

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"Robotics is shaping up to be the next transformative technology of our time, says legal expert Ryan Calo, who argues in a new paper that we need laws to deal with the rise of robotics and artificial intelligence.

“Technology has not stood still. The same private institutions that developed the Internet, from the armed forces to search engines, have initiated a significant shift toward robotics and artificial intelligence,” writes Calo, assistant professor in the School of Law at University of Washington.

“Courts that struggled for the proper metaphor to apply to the internet will struggle anew with robotics.”

Terminators and Hal

Though mention of robotics and artificial intelligence can prompt images of unstoppable Terminators and mutinous HAL 9000 computers, Calo dismisses such drama early on.

“And yet,” he says, “the widespread distribution of robotics in society will, like the internet, create deep social, cultural, economic, and of course legal tensions” long before any such sci-fi-style future."

Published in: Press , Robotics