Category Archives: Robots

Wendy Grossman, A really fancy hammer with a gun, captures a lot of what was good about our conference.

I understand NPR will be doing a story, but we don’t know if/when it will run.

The We Robot conference went very, very well. We should have videos uploaded in about a week. I’ll post links when I have them.

Meanwhile, here are some mini-videos shot by the UM Law staff during the conference.

• Michael Froomkin describing the start of We Robot 2012 at University of Miami School of Law
• Samir Chopra, professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York
• F. Patrick Hubbard, Professor, University of South Carolina School of Law
• Lisa Shay, Assistant Professor, US Military Academy
• Suneil Thomas on Liquid Robotics
• Program Chair Michael Froomkin on the future of We Robot 2012

Now I’m going to go get more rest…

We Robot 20112 starts in less than an hour.

I had dinner with many of the speakers last night, and I was delighted to find that one of my aims for the event seems to be coming true: many of the participants talked about the pleasure of finding — creating — a community of people with an interest in robots and society (law, economics, ethics, policy, medicine and more). There were even some people with ambitious plans to create community-building institutions.

Thanks in large part to the heroic efforts of Jessi Tamayo and the UM Law conference staff everything seems to be running like clockwork. Except the weather: it’s not just raining, it’s thundering, which is pretty unusual for Miami. I guess the bright side is that the conference participants will be less likely to mind being indoors all day — we do have a long program planned.

There will be a Live Video Stream and also a Live Video Stream For Mobile Devices. Plus links to all the papers for We Robot 2012. And we’ll be tweeting the event with hashtag #werobot.

Join in the fun!

The We Robot 2012 website is down temporarily due to a hardware failure. I’m assured by IT that it will be back up in 2-4 hours.

Update (2:15pm): All fixed now.

Update2 (4pm): We’re down again. I gather there was a second hardware fault, and the new part won’t be in until tomorrow. Terrible timing.

Update3 (4/14/12 2:30pm). Back up! IT thinks it’s all OK now.

Very nice writeup at Hizook, Robotics and the Law: The New ” We Robot ” Conference.

There’s a brief but enticing mention at Techdirt.

Three robopromos since my last update:

• Ian Kerr & Katie Szilagyi on “Asleep at the Switch? How Lethal Autonomous Robots Become a Force Multiplier of Military Necessity”
• AJung Moon, Ergun Calisgan, Fiorella Operto, Gianmarco Veruggio, and H.F. Machiel Van der Loos on “Open Roboethics: Establishing an Online Community for Accelerated Policy and Design Change”
• Ian Kerr and Jason Millar on “Delegation, Relinquishment and Responsibility: The Prospect of Expert Robots”

I’m going to be the discussant on the Kerr/Millar paper.

And we’ve now got almost all the papers online at the program.