It is the year 2023, and for the first time, a self-driving car navigating city streets strikes and kills a pedestrian. A lawsuit is sure to follow. But exactly what laws will apply? Today, the law is scrambling to keep up with the technology, which is moving forward at a breakneck pace, thanks to efforts by Apple, Audi, BMW, Ford [pdf], General Motors, Google, Honda, Mercedes, Nissan, Nvidia, Tesla, Toyota, and Volkswagen. Google's prototype self-driving cars, with test drivers always ready to take control, are already on city streets in Mountain View, Calif., and Austin, Texas. In the second half of 2015, Tesla Motors began allowing owners (not just test drivers) to switch on its Autopilot mode.

On tap at the brewpub. A nice dark red color with a nice head that left a lot of lace on the glass. Aroma is of raspberries and chocolate. Not much depth to speak of despite consisting of raspberries. The bourbon is pretty subtle as well. I really don't know that find a flavor this beer tastes like. I would prefer a little more carbonization to come through. It's pretty drinkable, but I wouldn't mind if this beer was available.

The best part about scuba diving is being able to see all kinds of amazing animals, plants, animals that looks like plants, and plants that look like animals. The worst part about scuba diving is not being able to squidge any of these things. I mean, don't you just want to give this thing a great big hug? While it's unlikely that me personally hugging any of these adorable creatures will ever be a good idea (however much I was seriously considering it while taking those pics), it is occasionally important for sea creatures to be aggressively groped in the name of science. Researchers at Harvard have endowed undersea robots with some squishy robotic fingers that allow them to non-destructively collect underwater specimens from under da sea.

I think the idea of designing robots that look like humans to better interact with humans is a solid "meh." The concept is good, but the execution is usually horrible, and the more your robot tries to look like a human, the more horrible it gets. Having said that, I think that the idea of using robots with specific human features, like eyes, can be a substantial asset for human-robot interaction, if you know what you're doing. Sean Andrist, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (who knows what he's doing), has been researching social gaze with robots. He's developed algorithms that help robots look at people at the right times and in the right ways.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your AI-enhanced Automaton bloggers. We'll be also posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. A video went around last week of a kid in Russia being pulled along on a snowboard by a drone. The title of the vid is "first droneboarding," and here it is in all its underwhelming glory: Now, here's a much more exciting video (using a much bigger quadrotor), also posted last week: "EPFL scientists have invented a new soft gripper that uses electroadhesion: flexible electrode flaps that act like a thumb-index gripper. It can pick up fragile objects of arbitrary shape and stiffness, like an egg, a water balloon or paper."

Everybody knows that anthropomorphic robots that try to look and act like people are creepy. There's been a bunch of research into just what it is about such androids that we don't like (watch the video below to get an idea of what we're talking about), and many researchers think that we get uncomfortable when we begin to lose the ability to confidently distinguish between what's human and what's not. This is why zombies are often placed at the very bottom of the Uncanny Valley: in many respects, they directly straddle that line, which is why they freak us out so much. The tricky part about robots, however, is that they can manifest "human-ness" in ways that are more than just physical. When robots start acting like humans, as opposed to just looking like them, things can get much more complicated.

Scatterings of completed buildings, sporting new plantings of drought-tolerant grasses, are already occupied; other buildings are going up quickly, including a new fire station. There's Nissan's new Silicon Valley research center, a well-financed medical device startup called Spiracur, a digital cash startup called Quisk, and a biotech startup incubator. And there is Baidu's Silicon Valley AI Lab--my destination along this dusty road crowded with construction vehicles. It's good to spend time in a new research lab; there's not only fresh paint and hip decor--like living walls of plants--there are fresh, excited faces, and empty desks waiting to be filled. In mid-2014, I spent a morning on just the other side of nearby Moffett Field watching a far more somber group of researchers moving out of a suddenly closed division of Microsoft Research.

Can artificial intelligence evolve as human baby does, learning about the world by seeing and interacting with its surroundings? That's one of the questions driving a huge cognitive psychology experiment that has revealed crucial differences in how humans and computers see images. The study has tested the limits of human and computer vision by examining each one's ability to recognize partial or fuzzy images of objects such as airplanes, eagles, horses, cars, and eyeglasses. Unsurprisingly, human brains proved far better than computers at recognizing these "minimal" images even as they became smaller and harder to identify. But the results also offer tantalizing clues about the quirks of human vision--clues that could improve computer vision algorithms and eventually lead to artificial intelligence that learns to understand the world the way a growing toddler does.

Human skin's natural ability to feel sensations such as touch and temperature difference is not easily replicated with artificial materials in the research lab. That challenge did not stop a Saudi Arabian research team from using cheap household items to make a "paper skin" that mimics many sensory functions of human skin. The artificial skin may represent the first single sensing platform capable of simultaneously measuring pressure, touch, proximity, temperature, humidity, flow, and pH levels. Previously, researchers have tried using exotic materials such as carbon nanotubes or silver nanoparticles to create sensors capable of measuring just a few of those things. By comparison, the team at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia used common off-the-shelf materials such as paper sticky notes, sponges, napkins and aluminum foil.

The prosaically named Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project, a planned observatory to be built on Mauna Kea, the Big Island, in Hawaii, is huge in every way: a reported US 1.4 billion dollar budget, a giant mirror composed of 492 smaller mirror segments, and a goal of investigating not just the stars in our Milky Way but galaxies forming at the very edge of the observable universe. Though this project is backed by the governments of China, Japan, Canada, and India, as well as the United States, it may never be built. For its location is considered sacred by some Hawaiians, whose protests have been heard all the way to the State Supreme Court of Hawaii, which in December 2015 invalidated TMT's previously granted building permit. With the project suspended for over a year, involved scientist and construction companies can only keep their fingers crossed that the contested case will go their way. In the meantime, Mitsubishi Electric, which has developed the main structure of TMT, announced this week the completion of a prototype robot for a segmented-handling system (SHS) to install and replace the mirror segments.