Category Archives: Robots

Legal Theory Bookworm Recommends “Robot Law”

Posted on March 27, 2016 by Michael Froomkin

Thank you Larry Solum! More here.

Previously: Just Got My Advance Copy of Robot Law.

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We Robot 2016 News

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Michael Froomkin

Papers for We Robot 2016 are now available from the Program Page — look for the colorful hyperlinks. If you’re coming, or if you are planning to follow along online, you will want to read as many of the papers as you can before the event. We Robot authors do not present their papers; instead we jump straight to the discussant, who summarizes the paper and then offers comments. The author(s) respond briefly, and then we turn it over to our amazing attendees for their questions and reactions. This makes for a much more substantive session, but it works better if you’ve read the paper in advance.

If you would prefer to download the papers all at once, here’s a zip file with all of the papers.

And if you haven’t registered yet, don’t delay: Registration closes on Monday at 5pm, and there will be only a very limited number of seats at the door.

(Links fixed!)

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Great Interview at Brink

Posted on March 14, 2016 by Michael Froomkin

Robot Law: Preventing Serious—and Subtle—Threats, featuring yours truly.

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Robot Cars Don’t Need 100% Safety

Posted on March 2, 2016 by Michael Froomkin

Nice write-up by Nicholas Deleon in Why Google’s Self-Driving Car Crash Doesn’t Change Anything.

As I told him, I think it’s wrong to expect robot cars to be 100% safe; so having a Google self-driving car in a fender-bender is of no real significance. There are a lot of issues with self-driving cars, but their failure to be perfect is not in my opinion one of them. Indeed, until all cars on the road are controlled by compatible (note I said compatible, not centrally controlled!) systems, the interaction between, excuse the term, legacy cars and robotic cars — not to mention pedestrians, stray animals, and debris on the road — means accidents will happen.

As I told Delon, one issue is whether the robot car is (provably) safer than the average human. Another issue is who should pay when the robot car is at fault, wholly or partly, for the accidents. The law has not determined how to allocate responsibility between the passenger, the owner, the programmer, and the manufacturer. We could treat this as a straight-forward problem of product liability law, or we could be more creative. I’m thinking on it.

Posted in Robots, The Media | 2 Comments

Popular Science Likes Our Book

Posted on February 9, 2016 by Michael Froomkin

Robot Law is the front of their homepage today, and the subject of an article, Rock ‘em, sock ‘em, cross examine ‘em.

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Just Got My Advance Copy of ‘Robot Law’!

Posted on February 2, 2016 by Michael Froomkin

This is exciting: just got my first copy of “Robot Law,” a book I edited with Ryan Calo and Ian Kerr. I suppose I might be a little biased, but I think it’s a pretty darn good collection that will give anyone interested in how society will cope with robots plenty to think about.

Robot Law is apparently going to list for $165 when it’s out in (very) late March, which is a lot, but you can pre-order it for less, or buy an online copy for much less. Meanwhile, however, you can peek inside, and read my introductory essay which gives you a tour of the wonderful contributions by our extraordinarily varied contributors. This is not a book just by some law profs: it’s an attempt to do real interdisciplinary work and, more importantly, to foster an ongoing series of interdisciplinary conversations.

Of course, the real-life place where we do that is at We Robot — registration for this year’s conference is now open and the early-bird discounted registration ends Friday.

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