The robot judge

Take the possibility of robot judges, presented at Gikii this year by intellectual property lawyer and entrepreneur Anna Ronkainnen of the Danish company Trademark Now. Her analysis led her to the conclusion that the much-feared “robotisation” of the law won’t happen – the law is too nuanced for artificial intelligence software to make appropriate judgements, she reckons. However, thinking about how future technology might affect legal decision-making does prepare us for what might be coming.

Not that putting algorithms in charge would be all bad. Earlier this year, legal scholars in the U.S. proposed that algorithms might be better than human law-enforcement officials at determining what is an appropriate level of intrusion for the purposes of surveillance. The basic idea is that a human detective on the trail of a suspected criminal will always want to go one step further because there is an intrinsic desire to make a past investment of work worth the effort. An algorithm will have no such motivation, and will therefore be in a better position to call off the hunt when it is right to do so.

Then there are the upcoming problems of direct interaction between humans and robots. Raymond Cuijpers of the Eindhoven University of Technology works on the development of robot caregivers that will meet the needs of elderly and other vulnerable people. The KSERA project researched how to obtain a successful, effective interaction between human and mobile robots, and part of this work involves thinking about the limits of legal responsibility. “You cannot put responsibility on the robot, it’s just a device,” he says.

Preliminary thinking is that liability lands on whoever sells the system, but Cuijpers admits that it’s not crystal clear. Imagine a scenario in wich a patient suffers after following bad instructions from a robot. “What if the patient says, ‘the robot told me to do this’?” Cuijpers asks. The manufacturer might claim the patient was too naïve to follow the robot’s instructions, while the patient could claim the robot was too persuasive to ignore.

That is particularly plausible given the trend toward equipping robots with ever more human-like capabilities. “If you can convince a person that the program is no longer distinguishable from a real person, you could have a serious legal problem,”

Cuijpers points out.

The advent of artificial intelligence will only make things more difficult in legal terms. If people want robots that clean their homes and empty their dishwashers, the robots will have to learn the layout of the house and where the crockery is kept. “If a robot is able to learn, the program it executes is not the same as the program it was initially installed with,” says Thomas Bolander of the Technical University of Denmark. “If it then injures a human, the manufacturer might say you didn’t teach it to empty the dishwasher in the right way, so this is not our responsibility.”

When the Internet can kill

The problem is potentially more acute if remote-surgery protocols go wrong. This too had its origins in sci-fi: Robert Heinlein wrote about it in a 1942 short story, and we are over a decade past the point where a surgeon in the U.S. operated a robot that performed an operation on a patient in France. Who would be legally responsible in the event of a breakdown in the connection to the robot? Strict testing and certification measures are already in place to prevent breakdowns in the technology itself, but bullet-proofing the long-distance communication protocols is still a work-in-progress, according to Sandra Hirche, professor of control engineering at the Technische Universität München. “The development of ‘safe-by-design’ protocols for communication over larger distances in robotic and other control applications is an active area of research,” she says. The question of who gets sued if something goes wrong will depend on how this research plays out – and how well the robot engineers and data service providers comply with agreed standards.

Another pitfall highlighted by sci-fi is the fact that we might find ourselves loving our new technologies too much. The recent

Hollywood movie Her highlighted the attachment disorders that might arise when computers become better friends than humans. We might not even need sci-fi examples for long. The MIT Media Lab has spawned Jibo, a cute domestic robot that can make shopping lists, dial phones and even tell children a bedtime story. It is clearly designed so that people will enjoy being in its company. But what if we become too dependent on it? “We can easily end up being addicted to technology and I think we should be made aware of the potential dangers,” Bolander says. “We spend a lot of resources warning about the dangers of addictions like smoking and drugs. Perhaps have to think about technology addictions in the same way.”

As the tobacco industry knows only too well, such issues can land manufacturers in court. With technology, it’s not yet clear what the law has to say. Hopefully, the Gikii lawyers will be, like Captain America, just prescient enough to save the day.