I mentioned earlier a panel discussion I participated in on robots, law and society at Stanford Law School a couple of weeks ago. Adam Gorlick at Physorg.com has a good article summing up the discussion.
Ryan Calo, of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, raises some of the fundamental liability issues and the implications for research and development — and I fully share his concerns, and more. (You can read an early draft of one of his academic law papers on privacy at SSRN.) What happens, for example, if the robot fails to call 911 as programmed?
[W]ho will be to blame if a robot-controlled weapon kills a civilian? Who can be sued if one of those new cars takes an unexpected turn into a crowd of pedestrians? And who is liable if the robot you programmed to bathe your elderly mother drowns her in the tub?
As mechanical engineers and computer scientists at Stanford develop technology that will transform the stuff of science fiction into everyday machinery, scholars at the Law School are thinking about the legal challenges that will arise.
“I worry that in the absence of some good, up-front thought about the question of liability, we’ll have some high-profile cases that will turn the public against robots or chill innovation and make it less likely for engineers to go into the field and less likely for capital to flow in the area,” said M. Ryan Calo, a residential fellow at the Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.
And the consequence of a flood of lawsuits, he said, is that the United States will fall behind other countries — like Japan and South Korea — that are also at the forefront of personal robot technology, a field that some analysts expect to exceed $5 billion in annual sales by 2015.
“We’re going to need to think about how to immunize manufacturers from lawsuits in appropriate circumstances,” Calo said, adding that defense contractors are usually shielded from liability when the robots and machines they make for the military accidentally injure a soldier.
One of the features of this discussion, as well as a discussion at Harvard Law School last week, was to ask what makes robots different as a matter of technology. A decent rule of thumb is that robots feature:
- mobility or or locomotion or at least some mechanism for physically interacting between it and the world, at the ‘gross motor level’ (yes, one can talk of computers interacting with the world by running the phone system or something, but robot technologies are special in part because of the machine itself physically taking motor actions);
- sensors that allow the robot to take in signals and streams of input from the outside world; and
- computational power (specifically, computational power that allows for learning of some kind to adapt the other features of physical action and mobility and sensors).
I don’t want to get doctrinal or theological here about the Essential Nature of Robots; these are just rules of thumbs. But they figure in how one thinks of robots as distinguished loosely from other technologies — and another thing noted in one of these discussions, and not a surprise, is that a larger proportion of the folks who work on them tend to come from mechanical engineering than computer science than is the case in computers or internet technologies.
(Update: One of the comments suggests that Asimov already addressed these questions fifty years ago, albeit speculatively. It’s an interesting sideline question. In my possibly fallible memory of the Robot stories, Asimov addressed many questions on the assumption of the three laws; the stories turned on interpretations of those laws. I often thought the most interesting aspect of the Robot stories was the construction of the different societies, based around robotics technology — Earth, crowded with humans and robot-phobic, at the one extreme, and Aurora, void of humans and filled with robots at the other extreme. It wasn’t the robots that were interesting — it was the comparison of the two societies. But I also think that the assumptions that Asimov built into his robot stories in order to give — as with all good fantasy, speculative fiction, fairy tales, ghost stories, horror — a structure with its own internal set of rules to keep us interested in the narrative, also meant that his stories did not address many of the things referenced in the post above. What do you think? Did Asimov cover the bases, and the rest is simply inflection; or am I right in thinking that there are vast areas quite untouched?)
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November 23, 2009, 7:31 pmjcm says:
There are no reason for distinguish among the rules for robot and animals. A programmed robot its like a trained dog.
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November 23, 2009, 7:55 pmDaniel Chapman says:
I find your ideas intriguing, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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November 23, 2009, 7:55 pmyankee says:
The most important legal question about robots: who’s in the chain of commerce of Skynet? They’re going to need a lot of insurance.
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November 23, 2009, 7:57 pmDaniel Chapman says:
JCM: So we’ll need a “cruelty to robots” statute?
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November 23, 2009, 7:59 pmRPT says:
Weren’t all of these questions addressed on a speculative basis by Isaac Asimov 50 years ago?
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November 23, 2009, 8:30 pmHarvey Mosley says:
I don’t see the problem. If the robot is not defective, the one who sets the robot in motion and directs it to perform an action is responsible. If it is defective (hardware or software) and that defect is the cause of the harm, the manufacturer is liable. Right?
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November 23, 2009, 9:58 pmEMB says:
It’s been more than half my life since I read those books so I may be wrong, but I seem to recall Solaria was the planet you’re thinking of and Aurora was the one from the third book.
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November 24, 2009, 12:24 amKen2 says:
A robot is any other machine — it has no free will.
It may appear to have free will, but it does not.
It is a more adaptable/flexible truck/fork lift/electric toothbrush.
So legally it should be treated the same.
Now if one wishes to declare it has free will — that sounds more like a question of philosophy or theology, than law.
To raise a more interesting question (to me): What if someone takes an animal and mixes some human genes in. At what point is that creature an “animal” and when is it “human”? After all, people in persistent vegetative state, or babies born with extreme brain damage, are still considered human. What if a pig/human hybrid was able to complete the human 5th grade?
Or a chimpanzee/human hybrid, since we have something like 97% common genes.
Could a dolphin/human hybrid enter (and win) Olympics swimming? Nobel prizes? Be liable for murder?
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November 24, 2009, 2:12 amGlenn Chambers says:
Sticking to the Asimov’s intention question, I have a fairly strong memory of an interview/review/discussion involving Asimov where he described the Three Laws as a literary device invoked exactly so he wouldn’t have to write about the various subjects brought up in this post.
He didn’t want to write a Frankenstein, or a slave-uprising story, or any of the other variants on robot-as-monster, so he made his robots into the perfect servants.
Towards the end of his career, he loosened up a bit, and explored some of the implications if breaking or weakening the Laws. The Foundation sequels tie into the Robot stories by way of the ‘Zeroth’ law, which expresses the Ultimate Collectivist Thesis that it’s OK to harm a human if it prevents harm to “Humanity”.
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November 24, 2009, 6:32 amCountDuckula says:
I’m sorry, but why are robots some kind of magic thing not covered by existing products liability law? When the robot electrocutes your grandmother in the bathroom you sue the manufacturer/designer. We already worked all this out, actually.
More generally, why does everyone seem to think a robot is anything more than a complicated machine? IT’S JUST A MACHINE, FOLKS, even if it looks like a person and has a speaker in its mouth that can make human noises. You don’t blame your toaster for burning your bread. It was either your fault for leaving it in too long or it was the manufacturer’s fault for building a faulty toaster. Anything else is mysticism.
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November 24, 2009, 9:34 amNotJustAMachine says:
What differentiates robots from other machines is that they are more-or-less autonomous and can interact with a physical environment with a relatively high degree of sophistication. I think evolutionary algorithms as part of robotic control systems pose potentially interesting questions of liability depending on the parameters (though as a layman I could be totally off-base).
XKCD: http://xkcd.com/534/
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November 24, 2009, 10:07 amAnon says:
There’s no more laws of robotics than there was a law of the horse.
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November 24, 2009, 11:30 amAnon says:
Harvey Mosely: Yes.
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dustydog says:
You’re worried about the wrong problems. Institutional use of robots will cause the greatest problems.
Right now, computers (internet, program, and interactive toys) are replacing humans as educators, because they do a much better job at delivering canned presentations, and teaching the middle. As the computers get smarter, they’ve do an even better job. If the smart machine misses a learning disability, or diagnoses hearing loss as laziness (something humans do routinely), who is at fault?
Robots will replace human prison guards. Human prisoners will be shuffled like mail. Safer for guards and for the prisoners. When somebody dies because the machine couldn’t do something that human guards couldn’t do (like rescue the guy playing basketball in the courtyard from getting stabbed), who is at fault?
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November 24, 2009, 2:32 pmPete says:
As was touched on earlier, Asimov’s three rules were simply literary hand waving. The devil here is in the details, the implementation of the rules is arbitrarily complex, not capable of a complete, proper, solution. Which runs into the second point I wanted to make. When a tool fails/injures a user/bystander, liability would seem to depend on whether the tool was being properly used. As complexity of systems goes up, that becomes more difficult (impossible) to determine. If you provide an unexpected (by the designer) situation to a system, and it fails or causes injury, whose fault is it? If a designer supplies a list of all of the test cases used on the product are you responsible to read that list, understand it, and not exceed its limits? Should Dell be liable when someone uses one of their dangerously powerful machines to hack into a hospital system and cause injury? Do you want to live in a society in which Dell would be?
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November 24, 2009, 2:33 pmPorkov says:
Is it possible to see a sentence that begins “Who will be to blame ... ” without shouting “Bush?”
Asimov and Kurzweil should be required reading before posting. When you can have your mind downloaded into a device, does it cease to be a device?
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November 24, 2009, 2:43 pmWind Rider says:
Hmm, as it so happens, I just recently re-read a significant portion of Dr. Asimov’s fictional robotic works. . .
There’s an unfortunate side effect to Dr. Asimov’s choice of the term ‘robot’ for his fables, and the utopian ‘Three Laws of Robotics’.
The side effect is that most people now frame their consideration of the topic via that paradigm. Which is, to use a phrase, ‘science fiction’, with the emphasis on ‘fiction’.
Asimov’s exploration of ‘robots’ and the extrapolation of the situational consequences of the ‘Three Laws’ provided a wealth of material, no doubt. A closer analysis of what he was –really– describing, in 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s familiar lay terminology were actually extreme and often ridiculously over-simplified explorations of the impact of artificial intelligence — not merely of a world (or worlds) populated by metal men doing human bidding. But then, most people seem to have become fascinated by the props, as opposed to the parables provided.
As such, for most situations, the world of Asimov is a distractionary, albeit often entertaining, red herring.
I’d have to go with Duckula here, and point out that, for the foreseeable future, ‘robots’ and other available automata, regardless of level of sophistication, are not really that much different from toasters — or shouldn’t be, in the eyes of the law. For one very simple reason — unless or until actual artificial intelligence is achieved, i.e. an artifice capable of performing the abstract analysis and application of judgement to reach a conclusion independent of something it is directly programmed to do — then the machines themselves bear no more ‘fault’ than a roller skate, or a can opener. Used as designed, or mis-used; well or faultily designed. Foreseeable or unforeseeable consequences. Ultimately, where the human is involved, and their actions, are what count. Does anyone have any question of wether the toaster of the person who tosses it, plugged in, into the tub with granny is to blame for the result?
These concepts are fairly well hashed out, and pretty straight forward, once the distractionary “new, improved, and even SHINIER” noise level is dispensed with.
Just my technically inclined but lay legal ‘opinion’.
The discussion can be either re-energized or re-directed when the machines pass a Turing test.
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November 24, 2009, 4:40 pmWind Rider says:
Sorry for the second bite here, but, I did happen to think of one of Asimov’s themes that is potentially applicable — and I can add, anecdotally, I’ve seen this one bite people in the behind on numerous, often very amusing, instances -
And that is, that people have a tendency to forget that the machines are just machines, and do, literally, exactly what they are instructed to do. Often with unexpected and sometimes undesired results.
But that’s not really new ground, either — should have read the fine print in the owner’s/user’s manual (or) should have put a warning label on that!
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November 24, 2009, 4:53 pmM. Report says:
3rd: A gray-shaded area, where a knowledgeable
person subverts a (sapient?) being’s programming,
typically by presenting it with an irresolvable
conflict as the Imams did with Nidal Hasan.
See also: “Jerry was a Man” “Underpeople” “Uplift”
and Crichton’s cautionary tale concerning
experimenters willing to set artificial evolution
to work, with unpredictable, hopefully profitable
outcome; Not so far in the future as one would wish.
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November 24, 2009, 9:03 pm