We Robot: The Conference
This looks like it has the potential to be a very interesting event:
The University of Miami School of Law seeks submissions for “We Robot” – an inaugural conference on legal and policy issues relating to robotics to be held in Coral Gables, Florida on April 21 & 22, 2012. We invite contributions by academics, practitioners, and industry in the form of scholarly papers or presentations of relevant projects.
We seek reports from the front lines of robot design and development, and invite contributions for works-in-progress sessions. In so doing, we hope to encourage conversations between the people designing, building, and deploying robots, and the people who design or influence the legal and social structures in which robots will operate.
Robotics seems increasingly likely to become a transformative technology. This conference will build on existing scholarship exploring the role of robotics to examine how the increasing sophistication of robots and their widespread deployment everywhere from the home, to hospitals, to public spaces, and even to the battlefield disrupts existing legal regimes or requires rethinking of various policy issues.
They’re still looking for papers at: http://www.we-robot.com. I encourage you to submit a paper on who will get successfully sued when the newly armed police drones turn out to be no more secure than Predators, with their viruses and unencrypted connections. (Of course, maybe the malware was just spyware.) Bonus points for entertainingly predicting quotes from the manufacturers about how no one could have seen that coming. Alternately, what will happen when the riot-detection algorithms decide that policemen who’ve covered their barcodes are the rioters, and opens fire on them?
The possibilities for emergent chaos are nearly endless.