Three Laws Blog: Law and Artificial Intelligence

Eliot on The Famous Wagon and the Donkey Doctrine As Applied To Al @LanceEliot @CodeXStanford

Lance B. Eliot, Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, has published The Famous Wagon And The Donkey Doctrine As Applied To AI. Here is the abstract.

The law consists of vital doctrines that are ostensibly invented rules of law. A particularly famous cornerstone consists of the court case involving the wagon and the donkey. We revisit this keystone and examine how such doctrines are to be uncovered or possibly even invented by the use of AI in the law.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Law, Technology, and Humans Launches @LawTechHum

A link to Law, Technology, and Humans, edited by Kieran Tranter of the School of Law, Queensland University of Technology. LTH is an online, open access publication devoted to an understanding of law and the technological future.

Katyal on Private Accountability in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Sonia Katyal, University of California School of Law, has published Private Accountability in the Age of Artificial Intelligence at 66 UCLA L. Rev. 54 (2019). Here is the abstract.

In this Article, I explore the impending conflict between the protection of civil rights and artificial intelligence (AI). While both areas of law have amassed rich and well-developed areas of scholarly work and doctrinal support, a growing body of scholars are interrogating the intersection between them. This Article argues that the issues surrounding algorithmic accountability demonstrate a deeper, more structural tension within a new generation of disputes regarding law and technology. As I argue, the true promise of AI does not lie in the information we reveal to one another, but rather in the questions it raises about the interaction of technology, property, and civil rights. For this reason, I argue that we are looking in the wrong place if we look only to the state to address issues of algorithmic accountability. Instead, we must turn to other ways to ensure more transparency and accountability that stem from private industry, rather than public regulation. The issue of algorithmic bias represents a crucial new world of civil rights concerns, one that is distinct in nature from the ones that preceded it. Since we are in a world where the activities of private corporations, rather than the state, are raising concerns about privacy, due process, and discrimination, we must focus on the role of private corporations in addressing the issue. Towards this end, I discuss a variety of tools to help eliminate the opacity of AI, including codes of conduct, impact statements, and whistleblower protection, which I argue carries the potential to encourage greater endogeneity in civil rights enforcement. Ultimately, by examining the relationship between private industry and civil rights, we can perhaps develop a new generation of forms of accountability in the process.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Bessen on The Policy Challenge of Artificial Intelligence @bu_law

James E. Bessen, BU School of Law, Technology & Policy Research Initiative, has published The Policy Challenge of Artificial Intelligence in the CPI Antitrust Chronicle, June 2018. Here is the abstract.

New "artificial intelligence" (AI) technology promises to bring dramatic social and economic changes, demanding major policy changes. In intellectual property and antitrust law, AI will exacerbate a damaging trend: across all major sectors of the economy, proprietary information technology is increasing the market dominance of large firms. This trend might not seem like bad news, but it is evidence of a slowdown in the spread of technical knowledge throughout the economy. The result is rising industry concentration, slower productivity growth and growing wage inequality. The key challenge to IP and antitrust policy will be counter this trend yet maintain innovation incentives.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

McLaughlin on Computer-Generated Inventions

Michael McLaughlin, American University Washington College of Law, has published Computer-Generated Inventions. Here is the abstract.

Technological advancements in artificial intelligence have threatened the axiom that conception, the mental part of invention, is a function exclusive to the human mind. Recently, machine learning technologies have allowed artificially intelligent computers to compose patent claims that amount to patentable subject matter. This technology is similarly used by innovators to optimize design configurations beyond the scope of human capacity. The type of patent protection to be afforded to computer-assisted and computer-generated inventions without human intervention has yet to be determined. To help bridge the gap, this article will illuminate how such technological advances could wreak havoc on the patent legal system as it currently stands and offer a proposal that will focus on a fundamental understanding of what qualities constitute inventorship and the philosophical justifications for property rights. This proposed solution examines why allowing computer-generated patents would contradict the underlying societal incentives behind the patent system and why innovation would not be stifled as a result of regulation. The resulting conclusion seeks to offer the legislature and judiciary a framework for determining the amount of human intervention required to ensure protection against the computer-assisted or computer-generated patent.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Thierer, Castillo, and Russell on Artificial Intelligence and Public Policy @AdamThierer @GeorgeMasonU @mercatus

Adam D. Thierer, Andrea Castillo, and Raymond Russell, all of the Mercatus Center, George Mason University, have published Artificial Intelligence and Public Policy. Here is the abstract.

There is growing interest in the market potential of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and applications as well as in the potential risks that these technologies might pose. As a result, questions are being raised about the legal and regulatory governance of AI, machine learning, “autonomous” systems, and related robotic and data technologies. Fearing concerns about labor market effects, social inequality, and even physical harm, some have called for precautionary regulations that could have the effect of limiting AI development and deployment. In this paper, we recommend a different policy framework for AI technologies. At this nascent stage of AI technology development, we think a better case can be made for prudence, patience, and a continuing embrace of “permissionless innovation” as it pertains to modern digital technologies. Unless a compelling case can be made that a new invention will bring serious harm to society, innovation should be allowed to continue unabated, and problems, if they develop at all, can be addressed later.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Driverless Cars and Empty Parking Lots

Uber is debuting driverless cars. Amid all the speculation about the impact on people who drive for a living (cab drivers, truck drivers, limo drivers, even the folks at the controls of trains, for example) and those who supplement their incomes by driving, like Uber drivers, there's another area of life that might see an impact if driverless cars, like those that Uber and Google are contemplating, actually take off (so to speak).

 

If the cars we love that normally sit in our driveways or outside our places of work actually are converted successfully to "autodrive" mode, then they wouldn't have to sit lonely and unloved for so many hours of the day (and night). I would think that eventually they would be reliable enough to drive themselves back to wherever they're going (otherwise why have them?) We could rent them out. When we get to work, or to the mall, we could send them back home, for example, and then call them back when we need them, or off to earn us some cash. So what would we do with all those parking lots and parking garages we now have, which now pave over all that lovely green space? And what would cities do without the income from those parking lots and parking meters? We wouldn't need quite so many of them but the cities would still need the money. Costs would, I suppose,  go up, people wouldn't park, might demand alternatives to get where they're going. Alternatives like mass transit. Which might result in fewer cars on the roads. It gives one furiously to think.

Business Thinks AI Is the Next Big Thing

Enrique Dans in Forbes: AI is the only thing that matters--at least for companies.

Barnhizer on the Future of Work

David Barnhizer, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, has published The Future of Work: Apps, Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Androids as Cleveland-Marshall Legal Studies Paper No. 289. Here is the abstract.

The analysis offered here is not a Neo-Luddite rage against “the machine.” As with the oft-stated reproach about paranoia, there sometimes really are situations in which people are “out to get you.” In our current situation the threat is not from people but from the convergence of a set of technological innovations that are and will increasingly have an enormous impact on the nature of work, economic and social inequality and the existence of the middle classes that are so vital to the durability of Western democracy. The fact is that developed nations’ economies such as found in Western Europe and the US are facing a convergence of technologies that fit into Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of “creative destruction” but without the “creative” phase of economic rebirth. The forces and technologies pushing us in this direction are relentless. In a globalized market economy where power and authority are dispersed across borders with nations holding incompatible interests and agendas and policy dictated by unaccountable multilateral institutions we lack the ability to impose limits on what is occurring even if we wanted to. This discussion is only peripherally about law schools and lawyers. Those two institutions are nothing more than derivative manifestations of what is occurring in our larger systems rather than the drivers or creators of economic and political forces. As US law schools experience a dramatic downward shift in applications and enrollments, concerned and increasingly panicked law faculties at many institutions are looking in the wrong direction and at the wrong factors in trying to determine their future. This is because anyone attempting to tease out strategies by which we can adapt to economic change by designing positive plans of action based on past cycles and workplace conditions is chained to a bench in Plato’s Cave — mistaking flickering shadows for concrete reality.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Robot Lawyers and Doctors? Or a Different System All Together?

Does the use of AI systems in lawyering and medicine mean that some attorneys and physicians will find it difficult to find work? Or does it mean that legal disputes that wouldn't have been dealt with will actually be resolved, and that health care that wouldn't have been delivered will actually be available? More here in an article from the Guardian.