Last month, a robot car hit a human-driven car for what appears to be the first time. The human occupying that car, a Google employee, trusted the machine's judgement when it changed lanes. There may not be a precedent for an exact case of Google driverless car fender-bender before, but that doesn't mean there's no precedent at all. To get there, we'll need to go to 1950, robots as functional metaphors, and a look into the existing history of robot law.

Here's the case, from University of Washington assistant law professor Ryan Calo's new study "Robots In American Law":

In the 1950 case Frye v. Baskin, the plaintiff owned a Jeep that he taught his minor son to drive. His son John was on a date with the defendant, a minor girl, whom John asked to take the wheel. She did not know to drive how but, "under his tutelage," she managed to drive the car around town for a time. At one point, John called out a direction to the girl and then reversed himself, telling her to go right instead of left. She tried to comply and wound up crashing the vehicle.