Blackman: Robot, Esq.

Professor Josh Blackman of South Texas College of Law has posted an extended abstract entitled Robot, Esq.

Here is a brief version of the abstract:

In the not-too-distant future, artificial intelligence systems will have the ability to reduce answering a legal question to the simplicity of performing a search. As transformational as this technology may be, it raises fundamental questions about how we view our legal system, the representation of clients, and the development of our law.

Before considering whether we can develop this technology, we must pause to consider whether we should develop it. Will it actually improve conditions for attorneys, non-attorneys, and the rule of law?

There are three important issues inherent in this change. First, what are the ethical implications of this technology to the traditional attorney-client relationship? Second, what are the jurisprudential implications of non-humans making and developing legal arguments? Third, how should we, or not, develop the legal and regulatory regimes to allow systems to engage in the practice of law?

This article opens the first chapter in this process, and sets forth an agenda of issues to consider as the intersection between law, technology, and justice merges.

Chopra and White on A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents

Professor Samir Chopra of the Brooklyn College Department of Philosophy, and Laurence F. White, Esq., have published A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents (University of Michigan Press, 2011). Here is the publisher’s summary:

As corporations and government agencies replace human employees with online customer service and automated phone systems, we become accustomed to doing business with nonhuman agents. If artificial intelligence (AI) technology advances as today’s leading researchers predict, these agents may soon function with such limited human input that they appear to act independently. When they achieve that level of autonomy, what legal status should they have?

Samir Chopra and Laurence F. White present a carefully reasoned discussion of how existing philosophy and legal theory can accommodate increasingly sophisticated AI technology. Arguing for the legal personhood of an artificial agent, the authors discuss what it means to say it has “knowledge” and the ability to make a decision. They consider key questions such as who must take responsibility for an agent’s actions, whom the agent serves, and whether it could face a conflict of interest.

Kahana on Legal Intelligent Software Agents: Germinating Seeds of Agency

Eran Kahana, Esq., of CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and DataCard Corporation has posted two more installments (numbered III and IV) in his series of posts entitled Germinating Seeds of Agency, at The CodeX Blog.

Click here for information about Mr. Kahana’s project entitled Autonomous Intelligent Cyber Entity (AiCE).

Call for Papers: dg.o 2011

A call for papers has been issued for dg.o 2011: The 12th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, to be held 12-15 June 2011, at the University of Maryland, in College Park, Maryland, USA. Here are the deadlines:

• 10 January 2011: Workshop, tutorial, and panel proposals due
• 6 February 2011: Papers, posters and demo descriptions due
• 30 March 2011: Camera-ready manuscripts due

Papers or proposals are invited on the following topics:

• “Digital Government Application Domains: such as courts, emergency response management, education, government statistics and data, grants administration, intelligence, international initiatives and cooperation, health and human services, law enforcement and criminal justice, legislative systems, natural resources management, open government (o-government), regulation and rulemaking, security, tax administration, transportation systems, and urban planning.
• IT-enabled Government Management and Operations: such as cross-boundary information sharing and integration, decision-making processes, digital government organization and management strategies, information assurance, information technology adoption and diffusion, IT and service architectures, long-term preservation and archiving of government information, program planning, service integration, as well as technology transition and transfer.
• Information Values and Policies: such as accessibility, digital democracy and governance, digital divide, openness, privacy, public participation in democratic processes, security, transparency, trust, and universal and equity of access to information and services.
• Information Technology and Tools to Support Government: such as cloud computing for digital government domains; collaboration tools; digital libraries and knowledge management; geographic information systems; human-computer interaction; intelligent agents; information integration; interoperable data, networks and architectures; large scale data and information acquisition and management; mobile government; multiple modalities and multimedia; national and international infrastructures for information and communication; service-oriented architectures; semantic web; and social networking, mashups, and software engineering for large-scale government projects.”

For more information, please see the call for papers.

Chopra on Rights for Autonomous Artificial Agents

Professor Samir Chopra of the Brooklyn College Department of Philosophy has published Rights for Autonomous Artificial Agents?, CACM: Communications of the ACM, August 2010, at 38-40 (Vol. 53, No. 8). Here is a summary:

Societal norms and the legal system constrain our interactions with other human beings (our fellow citizens or people of other nations), other legal persons (corporations and public bodies), or animal entities. There are, in parallel, rich philosophical discussions of the normative aspects of these interactions in social, political, and moral philosophy, and in epistemology and metaphysics. The law, taking its cues from these traditions, strives to provide structure to these interactions. It answers questions such as: What rights do our fellow citizens have? How do we judge them liable for their actions? When do we attribute knowledge to them? What sorts of responsibilities can (or should) be assigned to them? It is becoming increasingly clear these questions must be addressed with respect to artificial agents. So, what place within our legal system should these entities occupy so that we may do justice to the present system of socio-economic-legal arrangements, while continuing to safeguard our interests? [footnotes omitted]

Professor Chopra’s article discusses contracting, legal agency, rights, and legal personhood respecting autonomous artificial agents.

Kahana on Agency and the Autonomous Intelligent Cyber Entity

Eran Kahana, Esq., of CodeX: The Stanford Center for Computers and Law, and DataCard Corporation, has posted several resources related to his project entitled Autonomous Intelligent Cyber Entity (AiCE):

Here is the abstract of the project, according to the CodeX Projects page:

This project explores the commercial and legal aspects/implications of an intelligent cyberagent and its evolution into an autonomous intelligent cyber entity (AiCE, pronounced “ice”). It evaluates and builds functional and operational schemas for standardizing AiCE with an emphasis on reducing waste of judicial resources, increasing e-commerce transactional certainty and expanding into new frontiers for e-commerce interactivity on B2B, B2C and C2C levels.

Mr. Kahana has posted a position paper entitled Application of an Autonomous Intelligent Cyber Entity as a Veiled Identity Agent. Here is the abstract:

This position paper is based on the CodeX “Autonomous Intelligent Cyber Entity” (AiCE) book project. The AiCE draws on its intelligent and computational law capabilities to promote a safer, more efficient on-line environment. It is a flexible framework that can be configured to serve various purposes in business and individual-user settings. Due to its autonomous, intelligent and broad range functional capabilities, the success of AiCE is dependent on its entity status being formally recognized by law. This paper describes how this status can be granted by building on the same legal principles that endow U.S. corporations with an “entity” status; and while the focus here is purposefully narrowed to U.S. law, the same principles have universal application (a subject dealt with comprehensively in the book). Where the particular intention is to better protect a user’s private data, the AiCE can be configured by a user into an “AiCE Veiled Identity Agent” (AVIA). This AiCE configuration shields the user’s private information and offers him a “veiled” identity similar to that which corporate shareholders enjoy, all without degrading the flow of information vital to innovation and new value generation. This paper concludes with the introduction of the Uniform AiCE Transactions Act (UATA), an intelligent legal framework designed to govern all AiCE activity, promote trust and widespread adoption of this model.

Video and audio are available for Mr. Kahana’s 20 January 2010 presentation at Stanford Law School entitled Modeling and Implementing the Autonomous Intelligent Cyber Entity. Here is the abstract:

The Autonomous Intelligent Cyber Entity (AiCE) CodeX project models and examines the broad spectrum of legal and commercial issues surrounding the implementation of hyper-intelligent software code that has independent decision-making and computational law capabilities. AiCE’s functional scope is wide-ranging, limited only by what humans will be comfortable with allowing it to perform. It is able to, for instance, evaluate, negotiate, execute and monitor performance of (online) contracts. In that capacity, it can behave as a human party is expected to (including acting as an agent) yet it is unhampered by variables that ail humans, such as those that lead to complications and uncertainty relative to consent and effective post-execution performance monitoring. Using AiCE also raises numerous questions and challenges. A sampling of these will be discussed, and a conceptual preview of a novel legal framework called the “Uniform AiCE Commercial Transactions Act” (UATA) will be offered as a vehicle by which to resolve them.

Mr. Kahana yesterday published a new blogpost on this topic, entitled Germinating Seeds of Agency, at The CodeX Blog. Here is an excerpt:

It is inevitable and only a matter of (a short) time that in this reimagined reality, the use of some avatars will transcend the aquarium-like current environment in which virtual worlds exist. These new and improved avatars will take on the form of AiCE. They will get smarter in this evolutionary window; garner rights; be capable of autonomous operation in certain (initially) limited respects; be exponentially able to quickly learn and adapt to their new environment. In parallel, some users will decide to enable their AiCE to conduct business on their behalf (not just buy stuff on Amazon or eBay), use real-world money, shield their real-world identity (in the form of an AiCE Veiled Identity Agent) and bring about real-world consequences, both positive and negative in ways that are no longer confined to the virtual world aquarium. In this reimagined reality, the need for AiCE to be an Agent will no longer contain the should-factor; thus the seeds of the electronic Agent begin to germinate.

In May 2010 Mr. Kahana published a post entitled Artificial Intelligence Dynamic Rights at The CodeX Blog. Here is an excerpt:

In contrast to HCT [i.e., Human Centric Tasks "that are inherently (and currently) the domain of natural persons"], ENT [i.e., Entity Neutral Tasks, "that can be, from a normative perspective, comfortably performed by non-humans"] configurations do not involve taking decisions that exert moral choice. These are, therefore, dispositive of non-malleable inquiries into liability, punishment, deterrence, and so forth. We can thus see that the HCT/ENT distinction serves to delineate as to the circumstances in which AiCE rights analysis is relevant. It also answers the question posed above (if only partially so) by stating that: (1) Not all AiCE/AI configurations will receive any rights; (2) only AiCE/AI that require rights for performance of their mission will receive them and (3) which rights AiCE/AI receive will depend on the type of task they are configured to carry out.

Calo, Robotics & The Law: Liability For Personal Robots

M. Ryan Calo, Esq., a residential fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet & Society, has posted an abstract of an article in progress, entitled Section 230 Immunity for Personal Robotics. Here is the abstract:

“The field of personal robotics holds enormous promise, but robot-related injuries have already begun to occasion litigation. In 1999, for instance, a woman settled a lawsuit with her employer when a mail delivery robot allegedly pinned her against a wall, fracturing her toe and causing other injuries. Such incidents will multiply as we approach the millions of personal robots UN and other statistical models anticipate within the next few years. Lawsuits will invariably name robotics manufactures as defendants and early plaintiffs are likely to include highly sympathetic populations such as the elderly.

“As with personal computers, personal robots will be designed to be versatile. Many robots under development are essentially platforms that can be programmed, instructed, or remotely operated; others learn from their environment or respond to context; still others run on open source (i.e., multiple contributor) software. This blending of control means that there is no obvious way to apply standard concepts of tort – such as foreseeability, misuse, disclosure, and intentionality – to some of the most likely scenarios involving robot-related harm. The sheer complexity of robotics systems also make it possible that safety measures could prevent harm in some contexts but help cause it in others.

“The resulting legal uncertainty could discourage the flow of capital into robotics or narrow robot functionality, placing the United States behind other countries with a higher bar to litigation (and a head start). This essay explores the best legal infrastructure to prioritize safety and compensate victims while preserving the conditions for innovation and investment. The essay tentatively proposes a system modeled on our experience with the Internet. The generalized immunity enjoyed by websites under the Communications Decency Act for user content and filtering has permitted web services to proliferate and thrive. A ‘section 230 for personal robotics’ could limit legal risk to the manufacturer where the owner programmed, instructed, or ‘taught’ the robot to take the action at issue or where the harm resulted from a valid safety mechanism.”

Mr. Calo has provided more detail about the paper in his recent blogpost, entitled Robotics & The Law: Liability For Personal Robots.

HT @InternetLaw.

Panel: Legal Challenges in an Age of Robotics

[NOTE: Updated on 5 December 2009 to link to audio and video of the panel, and links to resources on robotics & law.]

A panel entitled Legal Challenges in an Age of Robotics will be held November 12, 2009 at Stanford Law School in Palo Alto, California, USA. Click here for audio and video of the panel. Here is a description of the topic:

“Once relegated to factories and fiction, robots are rapidly entering the mainstream. Advances in artificial intelligence translate into ever-broadening functionality and autonomy. Recent years have seen an explosion in the use of robotics in warfare, medicine, and exploration. Industry analysts and UN statistics predict equally significant growth in the market for personal or service robotics over the next few years. What unique legal challenges will the widespread availability of sophisticated robots pose? Three panelists with deep and varied expertise discuss the present, near future, and far future of robotics and the law.”

Panelists:

• Kenneth Anderson, Professor of Law, American University; Research Fellow, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University
• Paul Saffo, Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford University; Visiting Scholar, Stanford Media X; Columnist, ABCNews.com
• F. Daniel Siciliano, Faculty Director, Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance; Senior Lecturer in Law and Associate Dean for Executive Education and Special Programs, Stanford Law School

Moderator: M. Ryan Calo, Residential Fellow, Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

The event is co-Sponsored by Stanford’s Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance and the Stanford Program in Law Science and Technology‘s Center for Computers and Law (CodeX).

For more information, please see the announcement.

Click here for links to resources on robotics and law.

HT @legalgeekery & @montserratlj.

Sartor on Cognitive Automata and the Law

[NOTE: Updated on 21 October 2009 to link to the SSRN preprint.]

Professor Giovanni Sartor, of Università di Bologna, Centro Interdipartimentale de Ricerca in Storia del Diritto e Informatica Giuridica (CIRSFID), has published Cognitive Automata and the Law: Electronic Contracting and the Intentionality of Software Agents, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence & Law. A preprint is available on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

“I shall argue that software agents can be attributed cognitive states, since their behaviour can be best understood by adopting the intentional stance. These cognitive states are legally relevant when agents are delegated by their users to engage, without users’ review, in choices based on their the agents’ own knowledge. Consequently, both with regard to torts and to contracts, legal rules designed for humans can also be applied to software agents, even though the latter do not have rights and duties of their own. The implications of this approach in different areas of the law are then discussed, in particular with regard to contracts, torts, and personality.”