Technological development has faced criticism. The efficiency brought by industrialization and computer technology is expected to eventually lead to unpleasant outcome. The critics have developed by means of science-fiction stories about a future filled with technology. It is assumed that people stagnate and indulge only their animal desires. In the second scenario, the people become insensitive robots relying only on pure reason. (Steve Fuller, New frontiers in science and technology (Polity, Cambridge 2007) 232 p)

Herbert Marcuse was of the opinion that the logos of technology equals to the logos of slavery. People have become tools, even if it was thought that the technology releases persons. In his book One-dimensional Man published in 1964, Marcuse says that in the historical continuum man has been and will be the master of the other man. This is a social reality which societal changes do not affect. The basis for domination, however, has changed over the ages. Personal dependence has been replaced by an objective order of dependency, such as the dependency of a slave to the master has changed to the dependence of the economic laws and of the market. In accordance with Marcuse this higher form of rationality deprives natural and spiritual resources more efficiently and shares profits in a new way. A man can be seen as a slave in the production machinery and there is a battle of the existence in the production machinery. The battle affects with the destructive power the production machinery and its parts, such as builders and users.

Marcuse’s ideas certainly give some food for thought. And while I don’t completely agree with them. The debate continues in our new blog: http://legalfuturology.blogspot.com

Let me give you a brief introduction:

The title of the blog, Legal Futurology, contains a certain degree of deliberate ambiguity. You, Dear Reader, may wonder, what kind of a future we are talking about and what the law has to do it. At this point we don’t expect we will be writing about futures (the financial instruments) or about future developments in the law in general, say, regarding the resolution of the financial crisis or the next EU treaty or planned directive this or statute that or what the court will (or should) decide in Rubber v. Glue or whatever. While we cannot promise to avoid such topics altogether (classic evasive move there), what we have in mind are some very specific aspects of the future and the law.

The future we are referring to is that of the William Gibson quotation ‘The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.’ It is also that of Richard Susskind’s book Future of Law. And since at least one of us is a board-certified Legal Realist, there might be the odd dash of future in the sense of Prediction Theory thrown in as well.

More concretely, we both are researchers at the University of Helsinki working at the intersection of law and artificial intelligence. Our perspectives are quite different, as one of us (Anniina) studies AI as the object of legal regulation, whereas the other (Anna) studies AI as a tool to facilitate legal information retrieval or even do legal reasoning by itself. These complementary perspectives should open up for a broader range of topics than either one of us could do by herself. We are also planning to take advantage of this in more traditional fora through co-authored publications (stay tuned!).

Not many people in the legal academy study artificial intelligence or robotics. One fellow enthusiast, Kenneth Anderson at American University, posed a provocative question over at Volokh Conspiracy yesterday: will the Nobel Prize for literature ever go to a software engineer who writes a program that writes a novel?

What I like about Ken’s question is its basic plausibility. Software has already composed original music and helped invent a new type of toothbrush. It does the majority of stock trading. Software could one day write a book. A focus on the achievable is also what I find compelling about Larry Solum’s exploration of whether AI might serve as an executor of a trust or Ian Kerr’s discussion of the effects of software agents on commerce. Read the rest of this entry »

Doctoral research plan. Please feel free to comment!

1)                         Introduction

“Michigan held off Iowa for a 7-5 win on Saturday. The Hawkeyes (16-21) were unable to overcome a four-run sixth inning deficit. The Hawkeyes clawed back in the eighth inning, putting up one run.” This piece of sports news was generated by an intelligent system. It was written by Narrative Science’s computers in the United States. It was not created, nor edited by a human, which means that it is completely computer generated. This particular text is likely not protected by copyright, as it is not sufficiently original and creative. However, when the software evolves and becomes able to create writings that fulfill the prerequisites for copyright protection, the question of authorship becomes relevant. As lawyers, we will then face the question of how to approach this issue under the copyright laws. Another example: Google’s intelligent car was involved in an accident in August 2011. This time, a human was responsible for the accident, but what if the autonomous vehicle had been considered responsible? How would we fit the case within the legal regime governing legal liability? Further, what if an intruder breaks into the video camera of a robot and spies on children in their bedroom? How would this problem be approached from the perspective of the privacy laws? Read the rest of this entry »

Whether it was flying cars or jetpacks, we were all promised a compelling vision of the future at some point in our childhoods. And, although it may seem like science fiction, autonomous vehicles—cars that drive themselves—are more than just a promise; they are a growing reality. The widespread coverage in October 2010 of Google’s fleet of Toyota Prii that continue to navigate the highways of California was a clear message to the world that this technology is fact, not fiction. Questions remain, however, as to whether or not the world and the marketplace are ready for this technology.

To explore this topic, Beverly Lu and Matthew Moore (two PhD students at Caltech) conducted an assessment of the current status of autonomous vehicle technologies in the U.S—mainly through interviews with experts in the field. They focused on those technologies that are applicable to modern cars driven on existing, unmodified public roads. Their geographical focus was mainly on the west coast of the United States where a hotbed of activity regarding this technology is located.

To download the full article, click here.

Is it lawful for a car to drive itself? In the absence of any law to the contrary, it should well be. A new bill is working its way through the Nevada state legislature that would remove any doubt in that state. A.B. 511 directs the Nevada Department of Transportation to authorize autonomous vehicle testing in certain geographic areas of Nevada. Should vehicles meet Nevada DOT standards, they would be permitted to “operate on a highway.”

The bill defines not only autonomous vehicle, but artificial intelligence as well. AI is “the use of computers and related equipment to enable a machine to duplicate or mimic the behavior of human beings.” An autonomous vehicle uses “artificial intelligence, sensors, and [GPS] coordinates to drive itself.”

To be clear: autonomous vehicles are not yet the law of the land in Nevada. This bill must pass through two committees and receive a hearing before it can be voted on and become law. Some preliminary thoughts on the bill in its present form follow.

1) It is wonderful that the state of Nevada is being so proactive. The potential safety, mobility, efficiency, and other benefits of autonomous vehicles are enormous. Creating a process by which to test and certify such vehicles represents an invaluable step forward.

2) That said, the bill’s definition of autonomous vehicles is unclear, even circular. Autonomous driving exists on a spectrum. Many vehicles available today have autonomous features, while falling short of complete computer control. Surely the bill’s authors do not intend to require that, for instance, today’s self-parking Lexus LS 460L be tested and certified.

3) My personal guess is that it was John Markoff’s October 2010 coverage of Google’s autonomous vehicles that sparked this bill. I base this on the presence of that article on Nevada’s website under Exhibits/Senate.

One hopes A.B. 511 is the beginning of an important conversation about the promise and perils of autonomous driving in the United States. This Center, in conjunction with the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford, has started a program dedicated specifically to the Legal Aspects of Autonomous Driving. We just hired a fellow. Look to this blog in the coming months for more on this topic.

The bill itself is here. Thanks to Amanda Smith for her insights.

From an intellectual property perspective, the factors determining whether Artificial Intelligence programs are protected by copyright are the same as for ordinary computer programs. In contrast, the question of intelligent systems to act as authors is particularly interesting. In this case, the key issue is to the identity of the copyright owner: Is it the software, software copyright holders, users of the software, both or no one.

The Anglo-American and civil laws differ in this respect. In the U.S. and the UK, a work may be copyrighted, even if it is machine generated. There is a specific rule in the UK concerning computer-generated works and in the United States this conclusion can be achieved through interpretation. In Finland and elsewhere in Europe, it is assumed that copyrighted works should be made by man: The result of a mechanical operation is not entitled to copyright protection. Works of this kind shall not be regarded as independent and original as required by copyright law. Copyright to works created by an intelligent system does not belong to anyone. The civil law tradition emphasizes the importance of moral rights, which are connected to the author’s personality. In contrast, the Anglo-American copyright tradition is based on the economic rights and moral rights are largely ignored. The European Commission has drawn attention to the special provision on computer-generated works in the UK.  The Commission is concerned that the provision does not comply with the software Directive due to the broad scope of copyright protection granted thereunder.

The copyright system is meant to encourage the creation of works. It is true that machines do not need incentives to create. Machine-generated output, however, is affected by a number of people who, for example, program the machine. These people obviously need incentives, just as the author of a book or a composer. Copyright protection for machine-generated works would encourage the development of useful technology. In this sense, copyright protection should be available, also for machine-generated content, and should not be categorically prohibited, even if work performed by machines is to some extent mechanical. For example, short telegraph news are not necessarily protected irrespective of whether they are written by a man or machine. This kind of assessment of the creativity prerequisite is necessary. The assessment should not, however, be exclusively linked to a requirement that the direct author should be a man.

In the preparatory works and legal literature in the United States,  in the UK legislation and in Finnish preparatory works , authorship is allocated to the user of the software. The software programmer is ignored in this respect although the contribution by the programmer should be recognized. User actions may be extremely simple. This is the case when the user presses a button to compose. In intermediate works the output has been produced by the computer user and the computer programmer and/or a person producing the database. Therefore, both the user and the programmer should be considered co-authors in such cases. The most practical option to achieve this result would be to agree on a contract. However, it is obviously not possible to validly agree on the fulfillment of threshold for copyrightability.

This is an excerpt of an article published in Viestintäoikeuden vuosikirja 2010, Forum Iuris, Helsinki 2011, VII + 200 pages. Unfortunately, the book is only available in Finnish:

http://www.helsinki.fi/katti/julkaisu220211.htm

The paper on intelligent machines and legal liability has been published in the Nordic Journal of Commercial Law: http://www.njcl.utu.fi/

James Boyle of Duke Law School has written a nice paper on the issues around constitutional personhood for artificial intelligence. You’ll recall Lawrence Solum’s wonderful North Carolina Law Review article on AI and legal personhood from 1992. Solum was interested in whether soft AI might meet the technical requirements of a legal entity such as the executor of a trust. Boyle’s argument is more (too?) ambitious. Here’s an excerpt:

My point is a simple one. In the coming century, it is overwhelmingly likely that constitutional law will have to classify artificially created entities that have some but not all of the attributes we associate with human beings. They may look like human beings, but have a genome that is very different. Conversely, they may look very different, while genomic analysis reveals almost perfect genetic similarity. … How will, and how should, constitutional law meet these challenges?

I confess I am one of the “skeptics” Boyle refers to that “point to a history of overconfident predictions that the [AI] breakthrough was just around the corner.” We’ve been doing AI since that terms was coined at my alma matter in the 1950s and, as Mary-Anne Williams put it to me succinctly, robots today are about as smart as insects.

Boyle was specifically asked to write about the future. And he includes biologic possibilities that may be around an earlier corner. Either way, the paper is worth a read. (Hat tip to Gabe and Mike.)