The difference between robotics and automation is almost nonexistent and yet has a huge difference in everything from trade shows, marketing, publications to academic conferences and journals. This week, the difference was expressed as an opportunity in the Dear Colleague Letter below from Professor Ken Goldberg, CITRIS CPAR and UC Berkeley, who suggested that students whose papers were rejected from ICRA, revise them for CASE, the Conference on Automation Science and Engineering. This opportunity was expressed beautifully in the title quote from Professor Raja Chatila, ex President of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and current President of IEEE Global Society on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems. "One robot on Mars is robotics, ten robots on Mars is automation." Over 2000 papers were declined by ICRA today, including many that can be effectively revised for another conference such as IEEE CASE (deadline 15 March).

New technologies continue to shape society, albeit at an accelerating rate. Decades ago, societal change lagged behind tech innovation by many years, a decade or more. Now, change is occurring much faster as evidenced by the impact of disrupters including Uber and Airbnb. Central to much of the change is the data being collected, stored and analyzed for various reasons, not all of which are transparent. As the pace of technology innovation and tech-driven societal change accelerate, businesses are wise to think harder about the longer-term impacts of what they're doing, both good and bad. Technology in all its forms is just a tool that can be used for good or evil.

Worried about a dystopian future in which AI rule the world and humans are enslaved to autonomous technology? So are billionaires (kind of). First it was the Partnership on AI formed by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and IBM. Then came Elon Musk and Peter Thiel's recent investment in $1 billion research body, OpenAI. Now, a new batch of tech founders are throwing money at ethical artificial intelligence and autonomous systems.

Today, the IEEE kicked off a broad initiative to make ethics a part of the design process for systems using artificial intelligence. The effort, in the works for more than a year, hopes to spark conversations that lead to consensus-driven actions and has already generated three standards efforts. The society published a 138-page report today that outlines a smorgasbord of issues at the intersection of AI technology and values. They range from how to identify and handle privacy around personal information to how to define and audit human responsibilities for autonomous weapon systems. The report raises a laundry list of provocative questions, such as whether mixed-reality systems could be used for mind control or therapy.