With robots and data, can Google keep to its promise not to be evil?

This Friday and Saturday, Google’s latest product line will be on competitive display at a Florida racetrack. No, this isn’t about the self-driving cars Google has been famously developing, but rather another genre of semi-autonomous devices: robots. In recent months, the company has been on a robotics buying spree.

As the Guardian noted, Google has launched one of its so-called “moon shots” – a high-risk, high-reward push into an emerging or even nascent field. Robots aren’t new, of course, but there’s a relentless logic to Google’s moves in this and several other arenas the company has dominated or entered in the past few years.