Why it is not possible to regulate robots

There's an old joke about the sciences: biology is just applied chemistry, chemistry is just applied physics, and physics is just applied maths. It's really a neat little quip about essentialism and reductionism. While it's true that biology can be accurately described as "applied chemistry," treating living things as alive – and not as a set of chemical reactions no different in principle from making a cup of cocoa or extracting a pigment to use in housepaint – has undeniable utility.

But we draw boundaries. While there are disciplines that straddle biology and chemistry and treat organisms as though the most important thing about them is neither their chemical reactions nor the fact that they are living, we acknowledge that there are two great poles between which these gradations shade. There are a lot of things that we can point to and say, "that's chemistry" and there's a lot of things we can point to and say, "that's biology".

A computer that causes change:

 Is there such a thing as a robot? An excellent paper by Ryan Calo proposes that there is such a thing as a robot, and that, moreover, many of the thorniest, most interesting legal problems on our horizon will involve them.

 

Can 'robot law' be separated from software law?

 These are powerful regulatory tools, and they are in widespread use today. Surgical scalpels are horribly dangerous, and there are lots of rules about who is allowed to wield them and when, and what happens if you are negligent with one, or if you make one that isn't up to snuff. But we don't regulate anything that might be used as a scalpel. We don't try to keep anything that might be a scalpel out of non-medical hands. And we don't burden doctors or scalpel-makers with a mandate to ensure that they only part flesh in accord with the Hippocratic Oath.

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