A Brief History of Robot Law

When the robot found the shipwreck, the humans controlling it must have been elated. The SS Central America, a paddle wheel steamboat, had gone down in a hurricane in 1857, loaded with gold from the California Gold Rush. For more than a century treasure seekers searched in vain. But in 1988, a robotic submersible operated by an outfit called the Columbus-America Discovery Group finally found the wreck roughly 200 miles off the Georgia coast. Lawsuits soon challenged Columbus-America's claim to the gold.