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Envisioning the Law of Expert Robots
Two Canadian philosophers, Jason Miller and Ian Kerr, have posted an article on The Prospect of Expert Robots in which they consider a philosophical question that will have thorny implications for law: What if an expert human and an expert robot disagree on a matter of importance? By expert robot they mean a Big Data-loaded computer juiced up with algorithms that scour the data to produce answers within a complex decision domain that are on average more accurate than the answers counterpart human experts provide. Watson, in other words, is an expert computer at the game of Jeopardy, because it beat the world’s two most expert humans quite handily. But Watson is a toddler compared to the kind of expert computers on our horizon. Google’s driverless car, for example, is operating in a far more complex decision domain than is Watson, and seems to be doing quite a good job of avoiding accidents and traffic violations.
So consider some scenarios in the not too distant future in which expert computers are common throughout a wide array of decision domains and generally outperform their human expert counterparts. In one scenario they have replaced most of the human experts, making decisions free of human oversight. We’ve taken our hands off the wheel, so to speak, and delegated decision making to the expert computers. The expert computers aren’t perfect, however, so they will make mistakes. There will be driverless car crashes. Who’s liable when that happens? Can expert computers be negligent, or act with intent?
The more complex question Miller & Kerr treat, however, is what happens when the expert computers are working alongside human experts to produce good decision results and the two disagree about a crucial decision. Do we go with the human or the computer? If we go with the human and it turns out the computer was right, and the cost of the human’s error is significant, where does liability fall? And the reverse scenario presents the same question.
Miller & Kerr set up these scenarios nicely and work through some of the more profound normative questions they pose, concluding that there will be strong arguments in favor of delegation to expert computers but that the human impulse to retain control might make it difficult for society to take full advantage of what expert computers can offer. Liability rules also can have tremendous impact on the development and use of technology, and the expert computer world will present that problem in high resolution. Miller & Kerr concede that “our current models for assessing responsibility are not easily applicable in the case of expert robots” and that we have “barely scratched the surface regarding potential liability models.” Nevertheless, they worry that lawyers might gum up the works, such as by advising the roboticists designing the expert computers to ensure that the computers can explain their operations in the event of lawsuits, just as human experts do, which could impede the zeal with which roboticists work to develop better experts.
Watson playing Jeopardy is unlikely to get into any legal tangles, but IBM is not stopping with a win at Jeopardy. The law of expert robots is not that far into our future.
Building Scenarios of Legal Futures
Legal futurism relies on developing robust scenarios of the future to test possible legal developments and outcomes. A recent article in Futures, A Review of Scenario Planning, defines scenarios as “a set of hypothetical events set in the future constructed to clarify a possible chain of causal events as well as their decision points.” Three main principles go into good scenario planning:
- Identification of predetermined elements in the relevant business or policy environment that will drive and direct future outcomes
- Developing a macroscopic view that pushes people to explore the relevant environment over a wider area than they normally would
- A willingness to change mindsets in order to re-perceive reality
There are numerous techniques used in scenario planning, but generally they fall into two categories. Descriptive scenarios are extrapolative exercises designed to present a range of future likely alternative events. Normative scenarios are more goal directed and are designed to assist in implementing desired policy objectives. The primary focus of legal futurism is on building descriptive scenarios of the legal environment in order to test normative scenarios of legal responses. Developing legal futurism scenarios thus will involve a blend of non-legal and legal futures.
Climate change adaptation provides an obvious medium for this kind of scenario planning. Climate change presents a host of different impacts on public and private interests (the descriptive scenarios), and how public and private entities respond will depend in large part on their respective policy goal alternatives (the normative scenarios). For example, the interaction of sea level rise and storm intensity could play out over several different scenarios for a region, and possible policy responses include to “defend” the shoreline built environment with more infrastructure or to “retreat” from the increased threats by shifting land use development inland. Legal futurism combines these two interacting scenario sets to explore the likelihood of different legal developments, such as whether an aggressive retreat strategy might lead to public regulations triggering takings liability.
An excellent example of this kind of exercise is found in Dan Tarlock‘s recent article in the Vermont Law Review, Takings, Water Rights, and Climate Change. Tarlock combines descriptive scenarios of climate change with normative scenarios of policy responses to explore how takings law might apply to futures ranging from “sea-level rise inundates private property and the state asserts that the land is now subject to the public trust” to the state ordering “the diversion of water from entitlement holders to mitigate adverse climate-change impacts.” His analysis, which bears down how takings jurisprudence encourages moral hazard problems, reveals the usefulness of scenario building not only for anticipating and planning future legal developments, but also for gaining insight about existing legal doctrine. Thinking about how law might work in future scenarios, in other words, tells us something–perhaps a lot in some cases–about how it is working now.
Computerized Judging? The Finns are Leading the Way…
A post on Legal Futurology discusses a recent judicial reform report issued in Finland that includes the following recommendation:
In some types of cases the preparation process could be more strongly computer-supported. For example, when the elements of certain crimes are met, the system could automatically offer relevant phrasings as motivations, which could ease up the burden of processing simple high-volume cases, such as drunk driving. This could reduce routine work while at the same time safeguarding the high quality of the decisions.
The overall thrust of this part of the report is that by computerizing the decision-making process, maybe they won’t need as many judges as they have today. Perhaps it is not just practicing lawyers who should get up to speed on the law+tech movement!
What Would a Law Firm Research and Development Department Do?
One day when I was a young environmental law associate at a law firm in Austin, Texas, my managing partner asked what I thought was going to be “hot” in five years. He asked me to write up a short presentation on whatever I dreamed up and we and a few other lawyers in the office would present our ideas to a gathering of real estate industry representatives at a luncheon (our treat). My prediction was that the Endangered Species Act, which was not even on the radar screen in that part of Texas and hadn’t accounted for more than a few billable hours for me at the time, was going to become a major regulatory hammer throughout Central Texas and that some of the compliance approaches being tried in California could be adapted to our area. It turns out I was right, and the ESA consumed the following eight years of my law practice and for twenty years after that has remained at the center of my academic work and occasional consulting.
Law firms hosting luncheons for business development is nothing new. What was different about the one my managing partner threw together was that none of the topics we presented that day was generating any billable hours at the time. Rather, we were telling those gathered in the room something like: We think this set of issues is going to become a problem for you in a few years, and we are working on the solutions now so that if those problems do in fact surface, we are ready to help you navigate them. We were, in other words, engaging in research and development.
BusinessDictionary.com defines R&D as “systematic activity combining both basic and applied research, and aimed at discovering solutions to problems or creating new goods and knowledge. R&D may result in ownership of intellectual property such as patents. In accounting for R&D costs, the development costs may be carried forward but the basic and applied research costs are often written-off as incurred.” What we did that day almost perfectly fits this description–we deployed lawyers in the firm to discover solutions to anticipated legal problems, we demonstrated ownership of that problem-solving knowledge, and we wrote off the costs of developing and marketing that knowledge. It paid off in the form of clients and revenue not only for me but for several other lawyers in the office. We got the work when the problems materialized because clients knew we had already thought about the solutions.
What was missing, however, was that nothing about that process was the result of a systematic activity. (more…)
Will the Endangered Species Act Make It to 2050?
This week a task force of federal, state, and tribal agencies released the National Fish, Wildlife, and Plants Climate Adaptation Strategy, a 5-10 year plan for initiating actions to assist species adapting to climate change. The Endangered Species Act (ESA) does not figure prominently in the plan. Why not?
A few years ago I published an article in the Boston University Law Review, Climate Change and the Endangered Species Act, in which I outlined a trajectory of three key forces of species endangerment flowing from climate change:
- Ecosystem disruption: some species will find it difficult to persist within their current ranges as climate change pulls apart the species assemblies and ecosystem properties to which they have adapted over eons. Many such species are stuck where they are–migration is not an option. Salmon and pikas are examples.
- Adaptive species migrations: some species, however, will find migration an escape from climate disruption. Bravo for them! But when they move into habitat occupied by the “stuck” species, they will add yet another stressor.
- Human adaptation: as humans respond to climate change with sea walls, relocation of coastal cities, water diversions, agricultural adaptations, pest and disease controls, and a host of other adaptation responses, we will put yet more pressure on species at the margin. Humans in need of adaptation may feel less warm and fuzzy about species standing in the way.
The main thrusts of the article were that (1) the ESA is not designed for greenhouse gas emission regulation, but that (2) the ESA, if innovatively deployed by the Fish & Wildlife Service and NOAA, could facilitate species’ climate adaptations. I am beginning to think I was too optimistic.The legal futurist in me doesn’t give the ESA’s species-specific, land use regulation approach more than 10-15 more years before it is overrun by climate change. No way it makes it to 2050. (more…)
Quantum Lawyering
One of the barriers to data storage and processing in existing technology is its binary form: the basic component of computing–the “bits”–are limited to binary encoding as a 0 or a 1. Busting through the binary digital constraint would open up a completely new world of computational power. The March 8 issue of Science includes a special section on the line of research designed to do just that–quantum information processing (QIP). QIP uses quantum mechanics to enable an infinite number of states that could be encoded on each quantum bit, or “qubit.” Given the properties of quantum-mechanical objects, it will be an immense challenge to create the physical architecture to support qubits in computer technology, but if the past of computer science is any indication, we’ll get there.
The chasm between binary and quantum computation technologies captures the limits of the emerging law+tech movement. As a number of previous posts have covered, the law+tech movement is designed to leverage the robust data storage and processing capacities now available to shift some kinds of lawyering services from humans to computers. Many of the tasks that can be shifted are routine, such as e-discovery and automated contract drafting. Some of the tasks, however, are quite sophisticated, such as contract risk assessment and patent litigation planning, and some of the innovations coming out of law+tech are opening up capacities human lawyers could not hope to achieve, such as the data visualizations Ravel Law is experimenting with.
Whether you look at this as good or bad for the legal industry, it’s coming so get used to it. But as much as the law+tech innovators promise to change the way legal services are delivered, they can’t promise what I would call “Quantum Lawyering.” What do I mean by Quantum Lawyering? (more…)
Can Governments Be Held Liable for Failure to Adapt to Climate Change?
Looking into the future of climate change adaptation, meeting the twin climate change adaptation policy goals of reducing vulnerability and increasing resilience is difficult to envision without vast infusions of new and retrofitted infrastructure designed with adaptation in mind. A “defend the coast” strategy for a coastal jurisdiction facing sea level rise, for example, is likely to require coastal armoring and road improvements, and a retreat strategy necessarily requires new infrastructure to support displaced populations. Private and public investment in climate change adaptation infrastructure is likely to be extensive, and it is as likely that it will fail in some instances due to design defects and poor operating decisions. Given it is intended to reduce vulnerability and increase resilience, failure of adaptation infrastructure could have dire consequences for communities. If that happens, who will be liable? And what if government entities provide no adaptation infrastructure in the first place? The law of public infrastructure liability is likely to undergo intense pressure as questions like these are increasingly put in play. (more…)
Forum on Legal Issues in Managed Coastal Retreat
Columbia University Law school is holding a public forumon March 28 addressing Legal Issues in Managed Coastal Retreat. The conference description illustrates the kind of future scenario building needed to envision legal responses to the complexity of climate change adaptation on scales of this magnitude:
- What governmental actions in restricting development or reconstruction in vulnerable areas are “takings” that require compensation?
- How would the government adopt a policy of managed retreat from the coastlines—through changes in zoning and building codes, restrictions on infrastructure, or other methods? What process would be needed?
- What is the role of federal flood insurance and private insurance in shaping patterns of development or redevelopment in vulnerable areas?
- Where has managed retreat been attempted in the past? What is the experience with these attempts, and what procedures were followed?
Managing Systemic Risk in Legal Systems
In an article forthcoming in the Indiana Law Journal, Managing Systemic Risk in Legal Systems, I draw on complexity science, network theory, and the prospects of enhanced legal computation capacities to explore how systemic risk arises and persists in legal systems. The American legal system has proven remarkably robust even in the face vast and often tumultuous political, social, economic, and technological change. Yet our system of law is not unlike other complex social, biological, and physical systems in exhibiting local fragility in the midst of its global robustness. Understanding how this “robust yet fragile” (RYF) dilemma operates in legal systems is important to the extent law is expected to assist in managing systemic risk—the risk of large local or even system-wide failures—in other social systems. Indeed, legal system failures have been blamed as partly responsible for disasters such as the recent financial system crisis and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. If we cannot effectively manage systemic risk within the legal system, however, how can we expect the legal system to manage systemic risk elsewhere?
The Article employs a complexity science model of the RYF dilemma to explore why systemic risk persists in legal systems and how to manage it. Part I defines complexity in the context of the institutions and instruments that make up the legal system. Part II defines the five dimensions of robustness that support functionality of the legal system: (1) reliability; (2) efficiency; (3) scalability; (4) modularity, and (5) evolvability. Part III then defines system fragility, examining the internal and external constraints that impede legal system robustness and the fail-safe system control strategies for managing their effects. With those basic elements of the RYF dilemma model in place, Part IV defines systemic risk, exploring the paradoxical role of increasingly organized complexity brought about by fail-safe strategies as a source of legal system failure. (more…)
Law 2050 