Two decades of analysis have produced a rich set of insights as to how the law should apply to the Internet's peculiar characteristics. But, in the meantime, technology has not stood still. The same ...public and private institutions that developed the Internet, from the armed forces to search engines, have initiated a significant shift toward developing robotics and artificial intelligence. This Article is the first to examine what the introduction of a new, equally transformative technology means for cyberlaw and policy. Robotics has a different set of essential qualities than the Internet and accordingly will raise distinct legal issues. Robotics combines, for the first time, the promiscuity of data with the capacity to do physical harm; robotic systems accomplish tasks in ways that cannot be anticipated in advance; and robots increasingly blur the line between person and instrument. Robotics will prove "exceptional" in the sense of occasioning systematic changes to law, institutions, and the legal academy. But we will not be writing on a clean slate: many of the core insights and methods of cyberlaw will prove crucial in integrating robotics and perhaps whatever technology follows.
Modeling through Calo, Ryan
Duke law journal,
03/2022, Letnik:
71, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Theorists of justice have long imagined a decision-maker capable of acting wisely in every circumstance. Policymakers seldom live up to this ideal. They face well-understood limits, including an ...inability to anticipate the societal impacts of state intervention along a range of dimensions and values. Policymakers see around corners or address societal problems at their roots. When it comes to regulation and policy-setting, policymakers are often forced, in the memorable words of political economist Charles Lindblom, to "muddle through" as best they can.
Powerful new affordances, from supercomputing to artificial intelligence, have arisen in the decades since Lindblom's 1959 article that stand to enhance policymaking. Computer-aided modeling holds promise in delivering on the broader goals of forecasting and systems analysis developed in the 1970s, arming policymakers with the means to anticipate the impacts of state intervention along several lines-to model, instead of muddle. A few policymakers have already dipped a toe into these waters, others are being told that the water is warm.
The prospect that economic, physical, and even social forces could be modeled by machines confronts policymakers with a paradox. Society may expect policymakers to avail themselves of techniques already usefully deployed in other sectors, especially where statutes or executive orders require the agency to anticipate the impact of new rules on particular values. At the same time, "modeling through" holds novel perils that policymakers may be ill equipped to address. Concerns include privacy, brittleness, and automation bias, all of which law and technology scholars are keenly aware. They also include the extension and deepening of the quantifying turn in governance, a process that obscures normative judgments and recognizes only that which the machines can see. The water may be warm, but there are sharks in it.
These tensions are not new. And there is danger in hewing to the status quo. As modeling through gains traction, however, policymakers, constituents, and academic critics must remain vigilant. This being early days, American society is uniquely positioned to shape the transition from muddling to modeling.
Sharing economy firms such as Uber and Airbnb facilitate trusted transactions between strangers on digital platforms. This creates economic and other value but raises concerns around racial bias, ...safety, and fairness to competitors and workers that legal scholarship has begun to address. Missing from the literature, however, is a fundamental critique of the sharing economy grounded in asymmetries of information and power. This Essay, coauthored by a law professor and a technology ethnographer who studies work, labor, and technology, furnishes such a critique and proposes a meaningful response through updates to consumer protection law. Commercial firms have long used what they know about consumers to shape their behavior and maximize profits. Sitting between consumers and providers of services, however, sharing economy firms have a unique capacity to monitor and nudge all participants—including people whose livelihoods may depend on the platform. These firms reveal their monitoring activities only selectively. However, preliminary evidence suggests that sharing economy firms such as Uber may already be going too far, leveraging their access to information about users and their control over the user experience to mislead, coerce, or otherwise disadvantage sharing economy participants. This Essay argues that consumer protection law, with its longtime emphasis on restraining asymmetries of information and power, is well positioned to address this underexamined aspect of the sharing economy. Yet, the regulatory response to date seems outdated and superficial. To be effective, legal interventions must (1) reflect a deeper understanding of the acts and practices of digital platforms and (2) limit the incentives for sharing economy firms to abuse their position.
This Essay analyzes the ability of everyday Americans to resist and alter the conditions of government surveillance. Americans appear to have several avenues of resistance or reform. We can vote for ...privacy-friendly politicians, challenge surveillance in court, adopt encryption or other technologies, and put market pressure on companies not to cooperate with law enforcement. In practice, however, many of these avenues are limited. Reform-minded officials lack the capacity for real oversight. Litigants lack standing to invoke the Constitution in court. Encryption is not usable and can turn citizens into targets. Citizens can extract promises from companies to push back against government surveillance on their behalf but have no recourse if these promises are not enforced. By way of method, this Essay adopts Professor James Gibson's influential theory of affordances. Originating in psychology, and famous everywhere but in law, affordance theory has evolved into a general method of inquiry with its own useful vocabulary and commitments. This Essay leverages these concepts to lend structure to an otherwise-haphazard inquiry into the capabilities of citizens to perceive and affect surveillance. This Essay contributes to affordance theory by insisting that law itself represents an important affordance.
Talk of artificial intelligence is everywhere. People marvel at the capacity of machines to translate any language and master any game. Others condemn the use of secret algorithms to sentence ...criminal defendants or recoil at the prospect of machines gunning for blue, pink, and white-collar jobs. Some worry aloud that artificial intelligence will be humankind’s “final invention.” This essay, prepared in connection with UC Davis Law Review's 50th anniversary symposium, explains why AI is suddenly on everyone's mind and provides a roadmap to the major policy questions AI raises. The essay is designed to help policymakers, investors, technologists, scholars, and students understand the contemporary policy environment around AI at least well enough to initiate their own exploration. Topics covered include: justice and equity, use of force, safety and certification, privacy (including data parity) and taxation and displacement of labor. In addition to these topics, the essay will touch briefly on a selection of broader systemic questions: institutional configuration and expertise, investment and procurement, removing hurdles to accountability and correcting mental models of AI.
DISTINGUISHING PRIVACY LAW Angel, María P.; Calo, Ryan
Columbia law review,
03/2024, Letnik:
124, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
What distinguishes privacy violations from other harms? This has proven a surprisingly difficult question to answer. For over a century, privacy law scholars labored to define the elusive concept of ...privacy. Then they gave up. Efforts to distinguish privacy were superseded at the turn of the millennium by a new approach: a taxonomy of privacy problems grounded in social recognition. Privacy law became the field that simply studies whatever courts or scholars talk about as related to privacy.
Decades into privacy as social taxonomy, the field has expanded to encompass a broad range of information-based harms—from consumer manipulation to algorithmic bias—generating many rich insights. Yet this approach has come at a cost. This Essay diagnoses the pathologies of a field that has abandoned defining its core subject matter and offers a research agenda for privacy in the aftermath of social recognition.
Our critique is overdue. It is past time to think anew about exactly what work the concept of privacy is doing in a complex information environment and why a given societal problem—from discrimination to misinformation—is worthy of study under a privacy framework. Only then can privacy scholars articulate what we are expert in and participate meaningfully in global policy discussions about how best to govern information-based harms.
Why Govern Broken Tools? Calo, Ryan
The Journal of law, medicine & ethics,
01/2022, Letnik:
50, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In
, Brian Hutler et al. ably compare two approaches to the governance of digital contract tracing (DCT).
In this brief essay, I want to examine to what extent governance actually played a meaningful ...role in the failure of DCT. If DCT failed primarily for other reasons, then the authors' normative suggestion to pursue "a new governance approach … for designing and implementing DCT technology going forward" may be misplaced.
The impulse of so many organizations across nearly every sector of society to promulgate principles in response to the ascendance of artificial intelligence is understandable and predictable. There ...is some utility in public commitments to universal values in the context of AI, and common principles can lay a foundation for societal change. But ultimately what is missing is not knowledge about the content of ethics as much as political will. If, as both detractors and proponents claim, AI constitutes the transformative technology of our time, then one of the aspects of society that must transform is the law and legal institutions.
