Category Archives: Robots

“Issues in Robot Law and Policy” Published

book coverI’m happy to announce that my chapter on “Issues in robot law and policy” has been published as part of the Research Handbook on Law and Technology (Bartosz Brożek, Olia Kanevskaia, and Przemysław Pałka, eds., 2023).

It pains me that this is behind a paywall, although many university-based readers may be able to access it online through their library. The chapter achieves something I am rarely able to do: cover a very wide range of material in a short space. (Normally I’m stuck deep into the details.) The editors’ introduction (not paywalled) to the book calls my chapter “a tour de force of the debates ongoing for decades now, critically examining the intuitions tested over the years, as well as the challenges to come” which I think is a bit over the top, but I’ll take it.

The editors have done a pair of promotional videos for the book. There’s a fun one:

… and a more traditional version, which if truth be told is somewhat less fun:

It’s a very comprehensive book, covering a wide range of topics. Get your library to buy one?

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Electric Lunch

Click for larger imageBetter than science fiction:

A team of researchers at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT-Italian Institute of Technology) has created a totally edible and rechargeable battery, starting from materials that are normally consumed as part of our daily diet. The proof-of-concept battery cell has been described in a paper, recently published in the Advanced Materials journal. The possible applications are in health diagnostics, food quality monitoring and edible soft robotics.

Spotted via Completely Edible Rechargeable Battery Created;

Actually, of course, we won’t feed the robot the edible cells, we’ll eat them ourselves as part of medical devices and maybe ultimately food-quality monitors. As I.K. Ilic, V.Galli, L. Lamanna, P. Cataldi, L. Pasquale, V.F. Annese, A. Athanassiou, M. Caironi. An Edible Rechargeable Battery. Advanced Materials (2023) explains:

In this paper, we present the first edible rechargeable battery based only on organic redox-active materials. All the materials used in the formation of the battery are common food ingredients and additives that humans can eat without harm in large amounts, >100 mg per day. First, we prepared a composite of redox-active food additives and ingredients with activated carbon, a conductive food additive. This allows electrons to flow to and from the redox-active centers. Upon testing the electrochemical performance of these composites, we established two alternatives for cathode and anode materials. We chose the highest and the lowest redox reduction potential materials, namely riboflavin (vitamin B2) and quercetin, and assembled the battery using edible current collectors and packaging. Such a battery can be used to power edible electronic devices operating outside the human body, as well as those operating inside, once the packaging is adjusted for the application. While rechargeable properties of the battery might not be useful for short-lived applications inside the human body, edible devices operating outside the human body can be recharged, prolonging their lifetime. This long-sought achievement not only enables the development of edible electronics, but can also pave the way for the replacement of commercial batteries in ingestible devices, reducing their risk upon ingestion.

Meanwhile,
Q: How do you classify the role of an edible-battery tester?
A: It’s a high-power job.

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We Robot 2023 CFP — Boston Sept. 29-30

We Robot 2023 will be in Boston, MA, jointly hosted by the Boston University School of Law and the MIT Media Lab.

We Robot is the most exciting interdisciplinary conference on the legal and policy questions relating to robots. The increasing sophistication of robots and their widespread deployment everywhere—from the home, to hospitals, to public spaces, and even to the battlefield—disrupts existing legal regimes and requires new thinking on policy issues.

If you are on the front lines of robot theory, design, or development, we hope to see you here in Boston. Come join the conversations between the people designing, building, and deploying robots, and the people who design or influence the legal and social structures in which robots will operate.

We would also love to have you as a sponsor. If you are interested in discussing sponsorship opportunities, please get in touch.

News and Updates (twitter)

Key Dates

  • March 6: Submissions for papers, posters, and demos open.
  • March 27: Abstracts for papers and proposals for demos due.
  • April 7: We aim to have responses to paper and demo proposals.
  • June 1: Call for posters closes, but acceptances may be offered on a rolling basis (i.e. it may be beneficial to submit earlier).
  • August 31: Full papers due. They will be posted online at the conference web site unless otherwise agreed.
  • September 29-30: We Robot Conference
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On Robot & AI Personhood

The question of robot and AI personhood comes up a lot, and likely will come up even more in the future with the proliferation of models like GPT-3, which can be used to mimic human conversations very very convincingly. I just finished a first draft of a short essay surveying contemporary issues in robot law and policy; that gave me a chance to briefly sketch out my views on the personhood issue, and I figured I might share it here:

As the law currently stands in the United States and, as far as I know, everywhere else, ((The sole possible exception is Saudi Arabia, which gave ‘citizenship’ to a humanoid robot, Sophia, in 2017. It is hard to see this as anything more than a publicity stunt, both because female citizenship in Saudi Arabia comes with restrictions that do not seem to apply to Sophia, and because “her” “life” consists of … marketing for her Hong-Kong-based creators.1 the law treats all robots of every type as chattel. That is, in the words of Neil Richards and William Smart, “Robots are, and for many years will remain, tools. They are sophisticated tools that use complex software, to be sure, but no different in essence than a hammer, a power drill, a word processor, a web browser, or the braking system in your car.”2 It follows that robot personhood (or AI personhood) under law remains a remote prospect, and that some lesser form of increased legal protections for robots, beyond those normally accorded to chattels in order to protect their owners’ rights, also remain quite unlikely. Indeed, barring some game-changing breakthrough in neural networks or some other unforeseen technology, there seems little prospect that in the next decades machines of any sort will achieve the sort of self-awareness and sentience that we commonly associate with a legitimate claim to the bundle of rights and respect we organize under the rubric of personhood.3

There are, however, two different scenarios in which society or policymakers might choose to bestow some sort of rights or protections on robots beyond those normally given to chattels. The first is that we discover some social utility in the legal fiction that a robot is a person. No one, after all, seriously believes that a corporation is an actual person, or indeed that a corporation is alive or sentient,4 yet we accept the legal fiction of corporate personhood because it serves interests, such as the ability to transact in its own name, and limitation of actual humans’ liability, that society—or parts of it—find useful. Although nothing at present suggests similar social gains from the legal recognition of robotic personhood (indeed issues of liability and responsibility for robot harms need more clarity, not less accountability), conceivably policymakers might come to see things differently. In the meantime, it is likely that any need for, say, giving robots the power to transact. can be achieved through ordinary uses of the corporate form, in which a firm might for example be the legal owner of a robot.5

Early cases further suggest that U.S. courts are not willing to assign a copyright or a patent to a robot or an AI even when it generated the work or design at issue. Here, however, the primary justification has been straightforward statutory construction, holdings that the relevant U.S. laws only allow intellectual property rights to be granted to persons, and that the legislature did not intend to include machines within the that definition.6 Rules around the world may differ. For example an Australian federal court ordered an AI’s patent to be recognized by IP Australia.7 Similarly, a Chinese court found that an AI-produced text was deserving of copyright protection under Chinese law.8

A more plausible scenario for some sort of robot rights begins with the observation that human beings tend to anthropomorphize robots. As Kate Darling observes, “Our well-documented inclination to anthropomorphically relate to animals translates remarkably well to robots,” and ever so much more so to lifelike social robots designed to elicit that reaction—even when people know that they are really dealing with a machine.9 Similarly, studies suggest that many people are wired not only to feel more empathy towards lifelike robots than to other objects, but that as a result, harm to robots feels wrong.10 Thus, we might choose to ban the “abuse” of robots (beating, torturing) either because it offends people, or because we fear that some persons who abuse robots may develop habits of thought or behavior that will carry over into their relationships with live people or animals, abuse of which is commonly prohibited. Were we to find empirical support for the hypothesis that abuse of lifelike, or perhaps humanlike, robots makes abusive behavior towards people more likely, that would provide strong grounds for banning some types of harms to robots—a correlative 11 to giving robots certain rights against humans.12

It’s an early draft, so comments welcome!


Notes


  1. See Emily Reynolds, The agony of Sophia, the world’s first robot citizen condemned to a lifeless career in marketing, Wired (Jan. 6, 2018), https://www.wired.co.uk/article/sophia-robot-citizen-womens-rights-detriot-become-human-hanson-robotics. []
  2. Neil Richards & William Smart, How Should the Law Think About Robots? in Robot Law 1, 20 (Ryan Calo, A. Michael Froomkin and Ian Kerr, eds. 2016). []
  3. For an interesting exploration of the issues see James Boyle, Endowed by Their Creator? The Future of Constitutional Personhood, Brookings Institution (Mar. 9, 2011). For a full-throated denunciation of the ‘robots rights’ concept as philosophical error and ethical distraction, see Abeba Birhane & Jelle van Dijk, Robot Rights? Let’s Talk about Human Welfare Instead, Proceedings of the 3rd AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society 207-213 (Feb. 7, 2020). []
  4. Although, Charlie Stross has suggested we should think of corporations as “Slow AIs”. Charlie Stross, Dude, you broke the future!, Charlie’s Diary (Jan. 2, 2018), https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you-broke-the-future.html (transcript of remarks to 34th Chaos Communication Congress, Leipzig, Dec. 2017). []
  5. For speculation as to how a robot or AI might own itself, without people in the ownership chain see Shawn J. Bayern, Autonomous Organizations (2021); Shawn J. Bayern, Are Autonomous Entities Possible?, 114 Nw. U. L. Rev. Online 23 (2019); Lynn LoPuki, Algorithmic Entities, 95 U.C.L.A. L. Rev. 887 (2018). []
  6. See Thaler v. Vidal, 43 F.4th 1207 (Fed. Cir. 2022) (upholding USTO decision refusing application for patent in name of AI). For arguments in favor of granting such patents, see, e.g., Ryan Abbott, I Think, Therefore I Invent: Creative Computers and the Future of Patent Law, 57 B.C. L. Rev. 1079 (2016). For a European perspective see P. Bernt Hugenholtz & João Pedro Quintais, Copyright and Artificial Creation: Does EU Copyright Law Protect AI-Assisted Output?, 52 IIC – Int’l Rev. Int’l. Prop. and Competition L. 1190 (2021). The recent literature on the copyrightability of machine-generated texts is vast, starting with Annemarie Bridy, Coding Creativity: Copyright and the Artificially Intelligent Author, 2012 Stan. Tech. L. Rev. 5 (2012). An elegant recent article disagreeing with Bridy, with many citations to the literature, is Carys Craig & Ian Kerr, The Death of the AI Author, 52 Ottawa L. Rev. 31 (2021). []
  7. Commissioner of Patents v. Thaler (DABUS), [2022] FCAFC 62. []
  8. Paul Sawers, Chinese court rules AI-written article is protected by copyright, VentureBeat (Jan. 10, 2020), https://rai2022.umlaw.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/16_Chinese-court-rules-AI-written-article-is-protected-by-copyright.pdf. []
  9. Clifford Nass & Youngme Moon, Machines and Mindlessness: Social Responses to Computers. 56 J. Soc. Issues 81 (2000); Kate Darling, Extending Legal Protection to Social Robots in Robot Law 213, 214, 220 (Ryan Calo, A. Michael Froomkin and Ian Kerr, eds. 2016).  []
  10. Darling, supra note 9, at 223. []
  11. In Hohfeldian terms, if persons have a duty not to harm a robot, then, correlatively, the robot has right not to be harmed by those persons. See Pierre Schlag, How to Do Things with Hohfeld, 78 L. & Contemp. Probs. 185, 200-03 (2014). Hohfeld was concerned with the relations of persons, and probably would have thought the idea of property having rights to be a category error. Yet if the duty to forbear from certain harms extends to the owner of the robot as well as others, I submit that the “rights” term of the correlative relations is a useful way to describe what the robot has. []
  12. Darling, supra note 9, at 226-31. []
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#WeRobot 2021 Recordings Now Availalbe

If you missed any part of We Robot 2021, or you just want to enjoy it again, you’ll be pleased to know we’ve got recordings of the sessions available on line. If you want to read the paper before hearing the discussion (highly recommended!) see the We Robot 2021 program page for links to everything.

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#WeRobot Finished With a Bang!

(Metaphorically, only.)

We will have recordings of substantially all the discussions up online in about a week.

Meanwhile, you can still read the papers.  You might want to start with the prize-winners:

… although I’d also like to give a shout-out to two of my personal favorites:

That said, the papers all were really good, which is pretty amazing.

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