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If your robot butler murders your guests….

Image borrowed from Kindertrauma.com

 

It’s coming.  Once the self-driving cars hit the roads, you know these kinds of things are going to go into practice.  There are teams of lawyers being rolled up on both sides, because as sure as there will be the occasional truly robot-related fatality, there will also be cases of “death by robot” (like death by cop, but targeting AI driven mechanics).  There may be more legal precedents to draw on than we think (after all, we have been using robotics for assembly-lines for decades now) but the inclusion of the AI means a less clear-cut path of law.

Guidelines are already being considered over in the EU, I would presume that Japan already has their own set of guidelines as well, since they seem to be exploring even more radical uses for robots, like eldercare and healthcare for a rapidly aging population.

I’ve seen articles in The Economist and other places on this, here’s the direct link to the study findings (because I like to try to drill back to the source rather than echochamber).

www.robolaw.eu

 

So very very small.

 

“Nanotech” is one of my favorite arenas of emerging science.  Not just because of the science fiction potential, but because it requires a change in the way you think about machines.  It’s not a small change either, it’s like the difference between Physics 101 and Quantum Field Theory.  Really getting whats going on requires a baseline shift.

Programming swarm behaviors is a bit tricky, as I understand it.  Some of the prettiest examples I have seen are the recent forays into quadcopter control, but I have yet to see a truly “swarmy” cluster, they tend to either be orchestrated or smaller groups tasked to learn a behavior or execute an objective (soccerball bots come to mind).

http://www.extremetech.com