Ryan Calo (a law professor at University of Washington, a member of the WeRobot2014 organizing committee and a major intellectual in the law and technology field) has a new paper at this conference, “Robots and the New Cyberlaw.” It lays out better, I think, than any other currently what makes “robots” distinctive in terms of how law, regulation, and ethics need to frame of them. They are different from automation or cyber, for example, and Calo’s paper identifies three features particularly: “embodiment,” physical extension and actions in the world, mobility and motion; “emergence,” by which he means machine learning and self-learning and gradually increasing intelligence capabilities; and “social meaning.”