Biz & Tech // DOT. Commentary

Rise of robots means rethinking our laws

Sharpest of minds wrestling with the rise of the machines

One thing was immediately clear at We Robot, this week's conference on law and robotics at Stanford: Our legal system is woefully ill-prepared for the fast-approaching age of autonomous machines.

In fact, our very conception of the law may require rethinking for an era when both crime and punishment could be carried out by algorithms.

"You should be scared," said Col. Gregory Conti, an associate professor at the U.S. Military Academy, who presented a paper Monday exploring the use of software to detect traffic violations and issue tickets. "The letter of the law is pretty ugly when you can automate it."

The two-day annual conference draws some of the sharpest minds exploring the legal issues raised by the commercial use of robotics. It's one of some two dozen events in California scheduled to coincide with National Robotics Week, at which engineers, hobbyists, scholars and students gather to educate, celebrate and debate.

In the end, the legal scholars at Stanford presented more questions than answers. But they were some fascinating questions.

Our bodies, our parts?

During a break, I chatted with Ian Kerr, a law and philosophy professor at the University of Ottawa. He is exploring the issue of end-user agreements for digital body parts, the contracts people have to sign to get things like cochlear implants or robotic prosthetics.

He found that some medical device makers are adopting agreements not dissimilar to those covering iPads, with standard tech product clauses like voided warranties for unauthorized uses.

But is that the appropriate template when the product is a device that becomes part of one's body and, in the case of cochlear implants, requires first severing the auditory nerve?

Kerr said he is deeply concerned about the effects of these contracts, which could essentially limit a person's ability to make decisions about him or herself.

Similarly compelling questions came from Bryant Walker Smith, a Stanford fellow focused on law and policy related to driverless cars like the one being developed by Google. He presented a paper that explored whether selling such products place "longer and higher" legal duties onto the company.

Many businesses have few if any ongoing interactions with their customers. But partially or fully autonomous cars continually contact the company's servers, sending or pulling data about maps, road conditions, vehicle performance and more, as an essential part of the machine's functioning.

Walker Smith said that raises a host of liability questions.

-- If the car detects the driver is 6 feet 3, and the roof is designed to be safe in a crash only for drivers up to 6 feet, should the device warn that person?

-- If a driver is going 90 mph in a school zone, should it warn the individual - or contact the police?

-- If the company detects an error in the braking system, should it warn users, shut down the automated features - or push a software fix to every owner and hope it works?

"It's the complications that produce the really interesting and concerning questions," Walker Smith said.

There's also a more fundamental - and ultimately philosophical - question about driverless cars: At what point do we consider them safe enough for roads?

Human-driven cars, on average, get into accidents every 725,000 miles and fatal crashes every 300 million miles, Walker Smith found in a rough analysis. If robotic cars prove statistically safer, does that make them safe enough? Or do we wait until the technology gets closer to perfect safety, sacrificing potential saved lives along the way?

"The longer we take to get this to market, the more people will die," Walker Smith said.

Whose discretion?

West Point's Conti presented his paper, "Do Robots Dream of Electric Laws: An Experiment in the Law as Algorithm" alongside one of his co-authors, Woodrow Hartzog of the Cumberland School of Law. For the experiment, they asked 52 computer programmers to write algorithms to detect traffic violations and issue tickets based on real driving data.

Some were asked to code according to the letter of the law, others to the intent of the law.

The difference in the outcome was vast. The letter of the law group generally granted no tolerance for exceeding the speed limit, even momentarily while going downhill or transitioning from one speed zone to the next. They issued 498.33 tickets on average.

With the same traffic data in hand, the intent of the law group issued just 1.5.

Here's the point: Few of us, including the programmers, would want to live in a world where traffic laws are literally enforced as they are written.

There is flexibility and discretion built into our legal system, and that's a good thing (except where discretion is a bad thing, as with racial profiling).

"Laws are not traditionally written with automated processing in mind," the paper says. "Instead, they are often necessarily ambiguous and continuously contoured by court decisions and evolving social norms."

Future is now

The question is, how do we adjust our system for an age where laws can be carried out by codes that require precision and rigor?

Do we write laws that more accurately get at the behavior we're truly worried about; or do we write code with tolerance built in? And if it's the latter, do we risk relinquishing some of the balance of power in our legal system to programmers?

And here's another eye-crossing paradox: What if a robotic sensor catches a robotic car speeding? Who is responsible for the offense? The car, the owner, the manufacturer?

Again, these are all fascinating questions. But these are more than theoretical debates.

Cities have been implementing speed cameras for years. Google's cars have already traveled hundreds of thousands of miles on California's highways. And robotic technology of all sorts is rapidly getting cheaper, better and more pervasive.

Last fall, California became the third state to affirm the legality of driverless vehicles, immediately allowing testing on public roads and directing the Department of Motor Vehicles to begin crafting regulations for commercial sales.

As tough as the questions about robotics are, the time for our policymakers to grapple with them is now.



Follow James on:

James Temple writes the Dot-Commentary column for The San Francisco Chronicle and, focusing on technology policy issues, innovation and major trends in the industry.

Previously, he covered the Internet beat, focusing on Google, Yahoo, eBay and Microsoft. James has been a Bay Area business reporter for more than a decade, covering advertising, banking, retail and real estate for the San Francisco Business Times, Contra Costa Times and Bloomberg.

He has won a number of awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the National Association of Real Estate Editors and other groups. James also does video production for SFGate.

He is a graduate of Ohio University's E.W. Scripps School of Journalism.

Past Articles from this Author: