That is the title of this paper by Ryan Calo. Here is an excerpt from the abstract of the paper: “This article closely examines a half century of case law involving robots … Most of the cases involving robots have never found their way into legal scholarship. And yet, taken collectively, these cases reveal much about the assumptions and limitations of our legal system. Robots blur the line between people and instrument, for instance, and faulty notions about robots lead jurists to questionable or contradictory results. *** The article concludes that jurists on the whole possess poor, increasingly outdated views about robots and hence will not be well positioned to address the novel challenges they continue to pose.” We can’t wait to read the full article, and we will report back soon. For now, however, we pose a simple question: what happens when artificial intelligence is applied to fields like law and to legal reasoning generally?

What happens when robots can think?