eSignature Lawfulness for Business Ethics and Conduct Disclosure Statement

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[Music] ten years ago I was giving a talk at an engineering robotics conference I was the lawyer and the talk was on AI robotics and law and at the end of the talk of hand goes up in the Q&A and an engineer stands up and says I don't understand why we need all this law stuff and really he meant all these lawyers and all we have to do is make sure that all of our robots and AIS and all these things are programmed with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics and that it won't ask how many people here are where the Three Laws of Robotics but I did ask that at this conference and every hand in the room goes up a robot may not harm a human being a robot may not allow harm to come to itself unless it's required in order to spare the human being basic ethical considerations for robots so all good but the question that was being asked was why we needed anything more and at that time there wasn't really that much in the way of actual technologies that were out there the one could look at and see what their function was their purpose was how they operated the risks they pose the benefits they gained gave us and so in those circumstances it was going to be hard to answer that question from the engineer now fast forward to today and we're in a very different situation we are now actually seeing technologies AAI technologies move from prototype in the lab to actual functions and actual products and society and as we do that then the questions of law become much more important and looming and actual but important to stress it's because law can only get actual the technologies get actual or are very close to being actual and so we are reaching that point now nor reaching a point it's really quite a marvelous position to be in in which we now have enough actual real paths of technology that we can talk in real ways about the way in which society should regulate them and this is an exciting opportunity the regulation of actual technologies and in many ways this is going to be something that enables these technologies so there are enormous opportunities here we have to be sure that we take clear awareness of the various kinds of risks that are posed and the harms that are posed but this is what law regulation and technology have always done so in the middle of this exciting conversation we now find that there's kind of an extreme and extrusion from the outside which is that certain prominent scientists and technologists are telling us that we yes need to regulate AI but we need to regulate artificial intelligence technologies for a very different reason not for reasons about the risks posed today or within the immediately visible path of technology but because we have to be worried that at some point in the future these AI technologies may become progressively smarter and smarter to the point that they escape human control transcend their human programming pose an existential threat to humanity and ravages this would be not so important were we not beginning the conversation about actual regulation of actual technology now and I suggest that this is an extraordinarily bad idea in public policy and regulation and that it threatens to hijack this conversation that we desperately need to have about actual technologies today fact I would go one step further and say that we need to aggressively push back against this kind of voice at the moment that the real regulation is most important you need to push back against that in large part by just saying these things are not risks there are existential risks to humanity nuclear war possibility of a bio engineered pathogen that could you know go out and do terrible terrible things but these have some basis in actual technologies even if they haven't in fact been realized when we talk about the super intelligence that's going to be too smart for us and ravages we're talking about something completely different that's in the realm of imagination and I don't think that a bare logical possibility in a possible world as the philosophers might say constitutes a risk and it's certainly not a risk that analysis of the kind that law regulation and public policy can or should even take into account and that's in large part because we have plenty of risks that need to be taken into account for the technologies that we are actually seeing emerge now and can foresee very quickly coming into being but one of the questions that arises is why does this happen with AI technologies I mean in other words why are some of the most eminent voices in the field technologists you know great minds in the field why do they suddenly flip into this kind of AI apocalypse mode based around kind of imaginary possibilities we don't do this with other technologies nobody does this with toasters nobody does it with toasters that are connected to the Internet of Things well what is it about AI that winds up eliciting these kinds of responses and let me just call this AI enchantment the technology has this capability of enchanting the inventors enchanting users and let's be clear has the capacity to enchant the legal regulator type people lawyers the government regulators judges and legislators as well and by a chant I mean that it winds up leading to distorted perspectives distorted perceptions and distorted expectations about what the technology is what its capabilities and limitations are and winds up distorting the ways in which we think about it and this can happen in two different directions it can distort us into kind of the dystopian versions that are preferred by Hollywood the AI apocalypse apocalyptic AI but it can also be distorted in the other direction in the sort of utopian direction into kind of fantasies that these technologies will produce a sort of utopia in which we are all warm and happy all of our material needs are solved and we can just devote ourselves to mindfulness these are exaggerations of various kinds and the question is what brings them about how do they arise now I want to suggest it's because AI is special among technologies in the way in which it tends to destabilize mental categories we have that we use to structure our world and in destabilizing them suddenly the idea that there are sort of fixed limits and possibilities winds up getting all fuzzy up as well and blurred one of these lines that AI is particularly addressed to is the difference between creatures and things and in destabilizing that line along with the line of machine execution execution of its programming on the one hand and human consciousness intentionality purpose and will on the other those lines get blurred which artificial intelligence almost the very terminology invites us to do the result of that can wind up being that we suddenly have an explosion of mental possibilities of things that no longer seem to have limits to us not confined which can be a great thing until we try to enact that into law but in this process of an explosion of possibility as it leads to exaggerations that push out to these extremes the AI apocalypse on the one hand and angelic AI as we might call the utopian possibility on the other I think they're both mistakes but now particularly the technologists in the audience are thinking to themselves yeah but I do not suffer from sci-fi AI enchantment you know I mean I stick to my knitting and do stuff I'm not under this enchantment I want to suggest however that this is too quick a conclusion because there are ways in which you can have a form of AI enchantment dealing with very ordinary applications of the technologies that are in front of us today and are emerging in the foreseeable paths of technology now doesn't require any sci-fi possibilities there are a number of ways in which that can arise but the one I want to pinpoint today is one that I think is overlooked in part at least in the world beyond the technologists themselves and this is the fact that the language that we use to express human action turns out to be exactly the same words we use to describe machine actions so we say for human beings she decides to when we say decides in that case we are talking about decide as a word that is bound up and connected to all of human purposiveness she decides because she has intentions because she has purpose because she has will we used the same word when we talk about the computer deciding to take an action as it executes its programming if you and that's perfectly okay so long as one bears in mind that we don't actually mean quite the same thing and I don't know what alternative language we'd come up with it's very difficult to think of a whole new set of words that would describe what the machine is doing so we use the same words for both but insofar as those two get confused conflated and mixed up it invites very very distorted perceptions of what the technology might be now technologists and my experience are actually very attentive to this problem and don't tend to fall into it but I do not think that the ordinary world is going to be able to maintain some strict distance between these and differentiation and I can assure you that lawyers government regulators judges and legislators will not be able to maintain any kind of distance like that at least not if they are not educated and made aware of the possibilities in order to sort of separate out what's machine and what's misplaced expectations imported into AI technologies because we've pulled in a certain set of human concepts now law has a role to play in just regulation if you play in society I got a play by society's rules but with respect to this enchantment law can have a role in helping to disenchant sorry 2d enchant 2d enchant AI and to sort of take down some of this enchantment that threatens to distort and give us misperceptions and it does so primarily by two mechanisms one is that the law which is been dealing with new technologies for a long time looks at AI technologies as they come online and says we're gonna put them into existing legal categories and the legal categories we have out there reflect long-standing human concerns that are not going to go away human values that we have so safety there's one but also equality and justice and fairness and these other qualities that are reflected in categories of law and those are not going to get tossed out the window on account of some AI technology but they have the effect of sort of grounding the technology and giving it a sense of limits that are contained within human purposes the second way in which law can help be enchant AI is by call it siloing we will tend to regulate particular a AI technologies ing to the function they play and the existing laws and the existing regulations and the existing regulators soft driving car technologies will be regulated by the Department of Transportation the National Highway Safety Transportation Board Transportation Safety Board and stuff related to privacy stuff related to the use of facial recognition software predictive analytics and sentencing behavior for criminals all of these different kinds of things will tend to be regulated by whoever deals with that kind of stuff already and the effect of that is to break down the kind of illusion associated the enchantment associated with artificial intelligence considered as a single category all by itself we break it down and discrete and much more human oriented forms of technology and regulation now there is however a risk of course that law itself can become enchanted and that all these people that are part of the legal players legal actors can become enchanted and I think without concerted awareness and education become aware yeah I think they will be enchanted and they will have very distorted impressions about what the technology is what it's capable of what its limitations are there are two basic defenses against this kind of Enchantment of law one of them is that simply the people involved in this have got to be very sophisticated about the technology itself and I don't mean at the level of the computer scientists and engineers but I do mean in ways to be able to ask sophisticated questions that show an awareness of the distinct areas of AI machine learning and so on and so on at a level that will help them to ask the questions about these things from the standpoint of our human intended uses of the technology and that's the perspective that the regulator's should have they have to be able to translate that into something that's concrete the second way in which we wind up getting past this risk of enchantment is important because it says we will de enchant because we will insist that we treat AI technologies not as anything which is kind of outside or beyond human experience or anything even outside of human beings but that it's just another tool like any technology that human beings have invented ever and if we see AI technologies as just another human tool this again will tend to ground them in the question of how good are they at carrying out the things we care about as human beings and to the extent that law and regulation is able to make that kind of question concrete how good is it as a tool then we will be asking about the effectiveness of that tool in ways in which it can be bettered we will not be sitting around worrying about technology getting AI technology getting progressively smarter and smarter and smarter until it ravages us ravages us so the question that's going to arise for EIA I is never going to be is the technology too smart the problem is never going to be that the technology is too smart it will always be that it's too stupid and too stupid in the sense that it's a human tool and that's what we need it and use it for that means then that if we don't get past the enchantment of AI then we run the risk of thinking the problem is that it's too smart and if we frame it that way as a question of risks of being too smart that we must regulate against then we're going to wind up producing bad law for good technology if on the other hand we get past the AI enchantment we do get past it then in that case we will be able to focus on the question of the AI as a tool which we can make better and we will understand them that we can have better technology through better law thank you [Applause]