It’s almost 2010. 2010! The future is here!
So where, pray tell, are my freaking robots? When I was a kid, I was promised robots that would clean my house and prepare my meals and submit to my sexual perversions. Yet here we are, well into the 21st century, and there is not a robot slave to be found. What a ripoff. I’m so angry I feel like going back in time and killing John Connor.
I want my robot helpers, now. But the WSJ Law Blog and the San Francisco Chronicle tell me that I am nowhere near ready for the legal consequences of robots with access to home appliances and power tools. From the Law Blog:

A SF Chronicle story out Monday lays out the issue:
Robots have been an increasingly familiar sight in recent years, disarming explosives in Iraq, delivering mail in industrial complexes or bringing drugs to nurses in hospitals. . . .
As robots leave the factories and move into homes and businesses, there is going to be more and more interaction between regular people and increasingly more competent — and mobile — machines, said M. Ryan Calo, a residential fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. And more contact always means more problems, and the U.S. legal system better be prepared, he said.
“These are devices that don’t have a predetermined usage; they’re not toasters,” he said.
“There’s a growing concern now about robot ethics, but what’s missing from those discussions is pragmatic lawyers thinking about what’s going to happen in the future.”

I’m sure that Isaac Asimov has already thought through this problem, but let’s look at what some lawyers have to say.

A terrifying hypothetical comes out of Stanford:

The easy answer would seem to be that, well, whoever made the malfunctioning robot should be responsible for any damage stemming from a robot malfunction. But it’s apparently not that simple. Paul Saffo, a so-called “futurist” who’s a visiting scholar at Stanford, throws out the following hypothetical:
What about a scenario in which a pair of teenagers hacks into, say, a cleaning robot, and reprograms it to destroy a house? Might liability extend to the manufacturer who built the robot or the developer who designed it or the software engineer who programmed it?

That would be horrible, especially if you replace the “cleaning robot” with the robot sex slave that will (obviously) hit the market long before any robot intended for purely family use. Who will be at fault when your robot treats you like a Northwestern Law School exam?
Perhaps section 230 will do for the robot industry what it has already done for bloggers?

Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act gives “interactive computer services” immunity from liability for information put on their sites, which means Facebook or other Web site hosts can’t be sued for what others post on their site.

Robot inventors and manufacturers need to get off their asses and start making my life easier. The futurists and the lawyers aren’t dropping the ball. It’s the people making my phone a portable tracking device who need to keep their eyes on the robot prizes.
When the Robots Attack, How Will We Hold Them Liable? [WSJ Law Blog]