On the eve of We Robot 2025, here are links to my summaries of previous years. 2014 is missing; I didn’t make it that year for family reasons. There was no conference in 2024 in order to move the event back to its original April schedule (covid caused its move to September in 2020). These are my personal impressions; nothing I say here should be taken as representing the conference, its founders, its speakers, or their institutions.
We Robot was co-founded by Michael Froomkin, Ryan Calo, and Ian Kerr to bring together lawyers and engineers to think early about the coming conflicts in robots, law, and policy.
2024 No conference.
2023 The end of cool. After struggling to design a drone delivery service that had any benefits over today’s cycling couriers, we find ourselves less impressed by robot that can do somersaults but not do anything useful.
2022 Insert a human. “Robots” are now “sociotechnical systems”.
Workshop day Coding ethics. The conference struggles to design an ethical robot.
2021 Plausible diversions. How will robots rehape human space?
Workshop day Is the juice worth the squeeze?. We think about how to regulate delivery robots, which will likely have no user-serviceable parts. Title from Woody Hartzog.
2020 (virtual) The zero on the phone. AI exploitation becomes much more visible.
2019 Math, monsters, and metaphors. The trolley problem is dissected; the true danger is less robots than the “pile of math that does some stuff”.
Workshop day The Algernon problem. New participants remind that robots/AI are carrying out the commands of distant owners.
2018 Deception. The conference tries to tease out what makes robots different and revisits Madeleine Clare Elish’s moral crumple zones after the first pedestrian death by self-driving car.
Workshop day Late, noisy, and wrong. Engineers Bill Smart and Cindy Grimm explain why sensors never capture what you think they’re capturing and how AI systems use their data.
2017 Have robot, will legislate. Discussion of risks this year focused on the intermediate sitaution, when automation and human norms clash.
2016 Humans all the way down. Madeline Clare Elish introduces “moral crumple zones”.
Workshop day: The lab and the world. Bill Smart uses conference attendees in formation to show why building a robot is difficult.
2015 Multiplicity. A robot pet dog begs its owner for an upgraded service subscription.
2014 Missed conference
2013 Cautiously apocalyptic. Diversity of approaches to regulation will be needed to handle the diversity of robots.
2012 A really fancy hammer with a gun. Unsentimental engineer Bill Smart provided the title.
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