The natural enemy of robots

[Matterplay1]

Small children, as it happens.

"Children Beating Up Robot Inspires New Escape Maneuver System"

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robot...g-up-robot

There's a whole sequence of papers and articles with increasingly depressing titles, such as:

• Do Kids Care If Their Robot Friend Gets Stuffed Into a Closet? (spoiler: no)
  
• Escaping from Children’s Abuse of Social Robots.
  
• Why Do Children Abuse Robots?
  
• Robot Tries To Escape From Children's Abuse
  

Perhaps not a surprise if you think in terms of violence committed by humans against other humans. It starts high, in infancy, and drops dramatically between birth and the mid to late twenties. We notice the violence more in teens and young adulthood because by then people have near-adult size and strength and intellectual intelligence; though their inclination to violent behaviour has actually dropped quite dramatically from the time they were toddlers they are far more able to inflict damage when they do occasionally lose their temper and good judgment.

Turning this around into the OA scenario, if young vecs have a comparable developmental period then they'd likely be assigned less physically capable bodies until their self-control routines were fully developed. A lot of that would depend on the particulars of how new vecs are produced, of course, and this could vary hugely from clade to clade; in some cases the 'new 'individuals might be copies or shuffled copies of full adults and so this would not apply.