Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Neither the
Speaker 1: creators nor podcasters for Forward Thinking are bona fide legal counsel.
Speaker 1: Consult a local artificial intelligence before participating in actions that
Speaker 1: may or may not result in legal consequences a I
Speaker 1: crime may or may not be punishable in your quadrant.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to forwards Thinking.
Speaker 1: The podcast that looks the future says secret Secret, I've
Speaker 1: got a secret. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Laban, and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick. So how's everybody doing today? Not too bad?
Speaker 1: How about you? Joe? I am doing wonderful because we
Speaker 1: have a podcast topic that I'm very excited about, very excited.
Speaker 1: It's about breaking the law, breaking the law, which which
Speaker 1: we is the second time we have referred to that
Speaker 1: while we were in the studio and it's still funny
Speaker 1: to us. Yes, and so it's not about the future
Speaker 1: of judas priest. No I saw many Oh did you
Speaker 1: not get that reference at first? Oh? No, no, no,
Speaker 1: I was just like, what is the future of judus priests?
Speaker 1: Can we talk about that today? Instead? Can we just
Speaker 1: scrap this entire episode if I cannot do that, so
Speaker 1: let's let us focus on somehow. Because I don't have
Speaker 1: the notes on Judus Priest, I can't really talk about it.
Speaker 1: I don't think that would be an incredibly fruitful discussion. No, Instead,
Speaker 1: I want to talk about machines doing stuff they're not
Speaker 1: supposed to do the law, doing things that are socially unacceptable.
Speaker 1: I thought you're talking about like when my toaster burns
Speaker 1: the toast, but you're you're going a little further than that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that's lame. So this would be like my toaster
Speaker 1: going not criminal, a three state arson spree, burning down
Speaker 1: schools or something that would be more akin to what
Speaker 1: we're talking about. It actually would, because I want to
Speaker 1: ask a general question about where we draw the line
Speaker 1: for humans having to accept responsibility for what their machines do.
Speaker 1: Which humans have to accept the responsibility when a machine
Speaker 1: does something bad, sure, and or any types of machines exempt.
Speaker 1: So there was This was actually inspired by some news
Speaker 1: stories I saw recently, But I want to talk about
Speaker 1: some hypotheticals first, and then we'll get into some really
Speaker 1: bizarre actual examples of what it looks like when a
Speaker 1: semi autonomous machine does something not so cool. Okay, so
Speaker 1: let's say you are a roboticist. You enjoy building robots,
Speaker 1: all right, that that I could imagine that, sure, And
Speaker 1: the way you express this enjoyment is that you build
Speaker 1: a bipedal humanoid robot and program it to strut down
Speaker 1: the sidewalk, pushing random pedestrians into traffic. Well, that does
Speaker 1: not sound like me. But okay, are you sure. I've
Speaker 1: seen you pretty cranky some days. If that street were Twitter,
Speaker 1: if the street were if I were pushing pedestrians into Twitter,
Speaker 1: that I'm alright with that. Just right into the flow
Speaker 1: of the tweets. They're falling into the birds, the fail
Speaker 1: whale falls on top of them. But this example, this
Speaker 1: this hypothetical example you give where we we have a
Speaker 1: person who has created a machine specifically with the intent
Speaker 1: of harming others. Yeah, this is sort of a starting
Speaker 1: point because it should be obvious to everyone that the
Speaker 1: person who created this machine bears responsibility for what it does,
Speaker 1: right right, Yeah, because they designed the thing to do
Speaker 1: exactly what it is doing, which is bringing people into
Speaker 1: potential situations. Yeah. I would call this sort of like
Speaker 1: the weapon orientation towards robotics. You're simply using the robots
Speaker 1: body and programming as a weapon. Not much different than
Speaker 1: if you're using a big stick to bash somebody on
Speaker 1: the head. It's just like a more complex stick, right.
Speaker 1: So in other words, the robot itself is not at fault.
Speaker 1: It's actually carrying out the programming of and and the
Speaker 1: design for which it was built. It's really the person
Speaker 1: who was behind that design and programming who's truly at
Speaker 1: fault in this case. And furthermore, the robot doesn't know
Speaker 1: what it's doing. It's not aware of the fact that
Speaker 1: it's causing harm to humans because it doesn't understand complex situation, right,
Speaker 1: just as a an industrial robot doesn't understand that it's
Speaker 1: building a car. It's just following a very specific set
Speaker 1: of motions that it repeats until someone stops it, or
Speaker 1: like your room, but doesn't understand that it's freaking your
Speaker 1: cat right out. Yeah, well, I mean, we we have
Speaker 1: to assume these things assuming robots don't have secret consciousness.
Speaker 1: So fairly confident with that. But yeah, yeah, yeah, slightly
Speaker 1: different scenario. What if you imagine the same thing I
Speaker 1: just described, but one person writes the code for a
Speaker 1: bipedal robot that walks around pushing people, but never uploads
Speaker 1: it into a robot body because this programmer wrote the
Speaker 1: program as a joke. Then another person comes along takes
Speaker 1: that joke program uploads it into a robot body, not
Speaker 1: understanding what it would do when activated. Who's responsible? Then? Uh? So, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is interesting. I started king into court cases for
Speaker 1: the closest approximation I could find for these kind of
Speaker 1: scenarios because obviously we don't really have court law established
Speaker 1: for this kind of stuff because we're not quite there yet.
Speaker 1: But but if you think this is something that why
Speaker 1: are they even talking about this? It's never gonna happen.
Speaker 1: Just wait till we talk about a few cases later
Speaker 1: in this podcast. Right, And so some of the law
Speaker 1: I'm looking at it uh refers back to gun laws, gunmakers,
Speaker 1: guns sellers, that kind of thing. And the courts have
Speaker 1: found that gunmakers and gun sellers can be held accountable
Speaker 1: for practices that could end up allowing guns to enter
Speaker 1: the hands of criminals or gun traffickers if they have
Speaker 1: not shown that they have taken the proper steps, if
Speaker 1: they have been negligent in some way or purposefully allowing
Speaker 1: this to happen, they can be held criminally responsible. So
Speaker 1: it would probably be a case by case basis. Let's
Speaker 1: say that we have this hypothetical situation you have proposed,
Speaker 1: where someone has created a potentially hazardous program but not
Speaker 1: not actually executed that program. Someone else takes that program
Speaker 1: and uploads it to a robot, not knowing what the
Speaker 1: program does. That would be something that would have to
Speaker 1: be decided within an actual case, right, And I would
Speaker 1: imagine that it would be a very complicated, drawn out case,
Speaker 1: pricey a lot of different appeals, because the actual situation
Speaker 1: you've laid out here has so much wiggle room in
Speaker 1: either direction that it would be you know, it's impossible
Speaker 1: for us to say what the outcome would be. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and it obviously depends on the amount of harm done.
Speaker 1: And but there are certainly um for example, in voluntary
Speaker 1: man slaughter laws, sure, which means that you are still
Speaker 1: responsible for someone's death even though you completely did not
Speaker 1: mean to do it. Yeah yeah, there, it's really it's
Speaker 1: establishing the level of accountability. And you know what, whether
Speaker 1: in hent was there or not there, um, it would
Speaker 1: be it would be a complicated case. But I imagine
Speaker 1: that ultimately both parties would be held responsible. Both both
Speaker 1: humans in this hypothetical situation would likely be held responsible
Speaker 1: to what extent would depend upon the actual parameters of
Speaker 1: of the situation. Yeah, okay, here's another one, the third
Speaker 1: one that would be sort of analogous to the way
Speaker 1: we have to ask questions about weapons that exist today.
Speaker 1: What if one person builds and programs a pushing robot
Speaker 1: and sells it to somebody else, and then the new
Speaker 1: owner releases it onto the sidewalk and it does its thing.
Speaker 1: Who's responsible? Then? I think both parties would be held responsible.
Speaker 1: I think actually this one is way easier than the
Speaker 1: first hypothetical situation because you have someone who has designed
Speaker 1: a device specifically to put others into harm. There's no
Speaker 1: other reason for that device, Like, it's not a tool
Speaker 1: used for anything else. Okay, sure, this is this is
Speaker 1: a special concept because is there aren't really that many
Speaker 1: people pushing robots around right now, but but in the
Speaker 1: incredible future when we all have robots that are capable
Speaker 1: of pushing people. Um, I don't know, it's it's a
Speaker 1: it's a complicated and big question, and I would suspect
Speaker 1: that that the maker of the object could you know,
Speaker 1: make any number of arguments about the actual purpose of
Speaker 1: the object, and that it would be the person who
Speaker 1: sold the dangerous thing. And well, I can I can argument.
Speaker 1: I can see your argument because you could state that
Speaker 1: there are a lot of things out there where the
Speaker 1: the person who created it could argue their way out
Speaker 1: of the You know, I just built this thing. I
Speaker 1: didn't put it to use, and it wasn't my intent
Speaker 1: to have this be something to harm you know, innocent
Speaker 1: civilians or whatever. But in this particular hypothetical situation, it's
Speaker 1: hard to imagine a world where someone couldn't successfully argue
Speaker 1: you built a robot with the specific per us to
Speaker 1: push people. Um, well, let's make it more complicated because
Speaker 1: this this was we just started arguing about what was
Speaker 1: supposed to be the really easy, obvious example. Let's say
Speaker 1: you build a bipedal robot that is simply designed to
Speaker 1: walk forward on a flat surface. It's not designed to
Speaker 1: hurt anyone, and in fact, it has safety measures in
Speaker 1: place that are supposed to keep it from hurting anyone.
Speaker 1: But the problem is the person who programmed it's walking
Speaker 1: behavior did not write very good object recognition or collision
Speaker 1: detection code. So it walks down the sidewalk, occasionally accidentally
Speaker 1: pushing anyone who gets in its way. Is the programmer
Speaker 1: criminally liable? Could this be considered criminal negligence if someone's hurt?
Speaker 1: Probably not criminal negligence, at least not right now. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you're if you look at correlatives and other industries,
Speaker 1: this would be something akin to a defect, and you
Speaker 1: could pursue civil cases against the manufacturer, programmer, etcetera. You
Speaker 1: would actually have to identify which parties you would want
Speaker 1: to sue in pursuit of getting damages from whatever this
Speaker 1: you know entity is UH, and I would imagine it
Speaker 1: would follow that same route, So you wouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to necessarily sue them or or you wouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to pursue a claim of criminal negligence necessarily, but you
Speaker 1: might be able to say this defect in this UH
Speaker 1: in this device lead to injury suffering. Therefore, I'm going
Speaker 1: to ask for um some form of restitution on that UM,
Speaker 1: and liability would certainly still be on the side of
Speaker 1: whoever made the thing in that case. Yeah, and again
Speaker 1: I do think that it probably depends on the severity
Speaker 1: of the damage done of course, yeah, especially if you're
Speaker 1: talking about like lawsuits or something, right, Yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 1: let's muck this up even there. One last hypothetical before
Speaker 1: we get to the real examples. What if instead of
Speaker 1: one programmer, many waves of graduate students and professors in
Speaker 1: a university artificial intelligence lab work on various stages of
Speaker 1: source code for a robot that is designed to find
Speaker 1: the safest and best way to navigate a busy sidewalk,
Speaker 1: and over time, this robot gets very complex. It's a
Speaker 1: very complex piece of artificial intelligence. It's navigation decision making,
Speaker 1: is displaying unexpected emergent behaviors the way we would expect
Speaker 1: any highly advanced artificial intelligence program to have, and in
Speaker 1: one particular test, it decides to kick a slow poke
Speaker 1: out of the way. Now, it was never programmed to kick.
Speaker 1: In fact, you know, we can stipulate they put some
Speaker 1: kind of safety measures in place to make sure it
Speaker 1: didn't hurt people. But this program had enough complexity and
Speaker 1: freedom that it basically invented the move of a kick
Speaker 1: as a novel solution, sort of like how we talked
Speaker 1: about the artificial intelligence program that was able to identify
Speaker 1: what a cat was, define what a cat was by
Speaker 1: seeing enough examples of a cat. In this case, we're
Speaker 1: talking about an artificial intelligent program that comes up with
Speaker 1: a novel solution to trying to get through a particular
Speaker 1: an obstacle. Yeah. Yeah, So an unspecified emergent behavior from
Speaker 1: this robot or computer program does something socially unacceptable. Are
Speaker 1: the creators held accountable for it? This one is particularly tricky. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think at this point we just burn all computers
Speaker 1: and go back to living in caves. And it's it's
Speaker 1: possible that the only solution to this problem, and we'll
Speaker 1: talk more about this in a little bit, is to
Speaker 1: not is when we get to this level of complexity,
Speaker 1: this level of sophistication, is to not necessarily look back
Speaker 1: on the people who made it, who designed it. This
Speaker 1: is where we start to perhaps discuss the possibility of
Speaker 1: extending some form of the concept of personhood two robots,
Speaker 1: meaning that you'd have to have some form of liability
Speaker 1: upon the robot itself, which usually I mean you'd think like, well,
Speaker 1: how do you hold a robot responsible? I mean, you
Speaker 1: can't punish a robot. You can't you know, you can't
Speaker 1: go after a robot's bank account, A robot doesn't have
Speaker 1: a bank account. So in this case, you would have
Speaker 1: to create a whole new type of industry, essentially robot insurance,
Speaker 1: which would cover this sort of thing, and you would
Speaker 1: end up having the robot insurance would have to be
Speaker 1: the thing that would cover that liability. And in fact,
Speaker 1: this is something that people have honestly and seriously suggested.
Speaker 1: It will talk more about personhood and a little bit.
Speaker 1: We're going to discuss a specific implementation of robots and
Speaker 1: robot intelligence in the form of autonomous cars, a subject
Speaker 1: we've talked about a lot on this show, yes, and
Speaker 1: which is more practical than the walking robots we have
Speaker 1: been using as an example here, right right, So, so
Speaker 1: the kung fu robots will take a back seat figuratively speaking,
Speaker 1: in our autonomous car, and we will discuss personhood with that.
Speaker 1: But we've got some other things to talk about first. Sure. Well,
Speaker 1: there were a couple of news items I saw recently
Speaker 1: that made me want to talk about this subject in general,
Speaker 1: and they were both examples of where computer programs and
Speaker 1: you know, we've been using the word robot or bought
Speaker 1: kind of loosely. You know, there are embodied robots that
Speaker 1: have some kind of physical form. But we could also
Speaker 1: just be talking about computer programs. So these are computer
Speaker 1: programs that one way or another violated conventions in a
Speaker 1: way that was unacceptable at some level to law enforcement.
Speaker 1: So one of them is a shopper bot that bought drugs. Okay, Wait,
Speaker 1: you're gonna have to go a little more further into detail. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: So we want to go back to last year. There
Speaker 1: were some Swiss artists based in London that called themselves
Speaker 1: Median Group. Bit nick I hope I pronounced that right.
Speaker 1: It starts with an exclamation point before the Median Group. Okay.
Speaker 1: And they conceived an art project exploring the existence and
Speaker 1: implications of underground marketplaces on the deep Web. So I
Speaker 1: think they were sort of trying to get at what
Speaker 1: it means that we have these just continuous, ongoing underground
Speaker 1: markets for illicit goods, all right. And they created a
Speaker 1: program called the Random Darknet Shopper. It is an online
Speaker 1: shopping bot. It's a computer program that once a week
Speaker 1: goes into a marketplace on the deep Web. Brief side note,
Speaker 1: Jonathan explained the deep Web in less than a hundred words.
Speaker 1: All right. So it's theoretically the untraceable anonymous web where
Speaker 1: you can do clandestine things without having all your online
Speaker 1: motions tracked. Right, So, if there's an iceberg, that is
Speaker 1: the Worldwide Web. The part poking out the top is Google, Yahoo,
Speaker 1: all the normal stuff we do, and then below the
Speaker 1: surface is this massive hive of scum and villainy. Well
Speaker 1: it's not, I would argue, it's not as massive as
Speaker 1: what the iceberg example would have you believe. But yes,
Speaker 1: that otherwise is accurate. Okay. Anyway, so backing up, this
Speaker 1: computer program, once a week goes onto a marketplace on
Speaker 1: the deep Web with a hundred dollars worth of bitcoin
Speaker 1: to spend, okay, and it makes a random purchase each week.
Speaker 1: All right, So what are some of the purchases. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: here is a sampling of some things. The random darknet
Speaker 1: shopper randomly bought fake diesel jeans of course, a stash
Speaker 1: can that looks like a can of sprite. I believe
Speaker 1: a stash can I think is too high drugs or
Speaker 1: other illicit substances in I would I would imagine correct jewelry.
Speaker 1: If you don't want brobbers to find your jewelry. That
Speaker 1: is a very good cover story Lauren. Also it bought
Speaker 1: a Lord of the Rings e book collection. Would you
Speaker 1: would you might store your e hobbits in baseball cap
Speaker 1: with a hidden camera inside. Of course, some Nike shoes.
Speaker 1: It came up with a fake Hungarian passport scan, ten
Speaker 1: packs of Chesterfield Blue cigarettes from Moldavia. And here's the
Speaker 1: big one, a packet of ten hundred and twenty mill
Speaker 1: Graham tablets of M D M A. That's ecstasy. Ah.
Speaker 1: And so the the all of these things I believe
Speaker 1: were delivered by the sellers to the artists and then
Speaker 1: they were displayed at an art exhibition about this, about
Speaker 1: this shopper at Kunstall and Saint Gallen called the dark
Speaker 1: Net from Memes to onion Land, and that exhibit was
Speaker 1: open through January eleven. So they had to know, the
Speaker 1: artists had to know when they made this Darknet shopper,
Speaker 1: that it was possible, maybe even very likely, that this
Speaker 1: shopping bot would buy something illegal. Well, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: the the one of the things, it's they're looking at
Speaker 1: underground markets right right. They could have had it go
Speaker 1: on Amazon if they had wanted it to bring back
Speaker 1: nothing but chocolate and at the very worst, like novelty
Speaker 1: sex toys, though you may note from the things I
Speaker 1: listed that while most of its purchases were somewhat sketchy,
Speaker 1: most of them also were not illegal, and there are
Speaker 1: many not illegal things on sure. Yeah, I mean it's
Speaker 1: It's one of the things we like to mention is
Speaker 1: the fact that while there are plenty t of examples
Speaker 1: of illegal goods, people using the Deep Web for purposes
Speaker 1: to you know, illegal purposes, that's not the only reason.
Speaker 1: There are plenty of people who are just very concerned
Speaker 1: about their privacy. They don't want they don't want their
Speaker 1: purchases tracked by people. They want the freedom to be
Speaker 1: able to shop without any kind of uh, you know, supervision,
Speaker 1: whether it's corporate or government or whatever. And it has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with trying to shop for illegal goods. Sure,
Speaker 1: but I would guess that probably the artists in question,
Speaker 1: we're sort of hoping. I mean, it's hard to speculate,
Speaker 1: you know, we can't really know, but yeah, they must
Speaker 1: have known that it was highly possible that it would
Speaker 1: buy something illegal, even though they never explicitly told it
Speaker 1: to do so. Right, So, what's the deal? Are these
Speaker 1: artists criminally liable for in countries that have drug laws
Speaker 1: against buying something like M D M A. And should
Speaker 1: they be held criminally liabele in such a case. I mean,
Speaker 1: putting aside whatever you think about drug laws and all that,
Speaker 1: just assuming this program bought something that's against the law,
Speaker 1: should that be should the art the people who created
Speaker 1: something like this be punishable under the law, right, considering
Speaker 1: that the assuming of course, that that the the shopping
Speaker 1: truly was random, that that there was no way to
Speaker 1: direct said shop bot to go for anything. In particular,
Speaker 1: is it the fault of the programmers if the shop
Speaker 1: bought actually does buy something that is illegal, and it's
Speaker 1: that's a complicated question. Yeah, I mean it would be
Speaker 1: almost like if you if you created a bipedal robot
Speaker 1: with a sack full of items and then sent it
Speaker 1: down into the street with instructions to barter with random strangers.
Speaker 1: Now what if it came back with some drugs or
Speaker 1: some illegal guns or something, right, I mean, what what
Speaker 1: would you think then? Well, and and part of it
Speaker 1: made us be that the this is the source stuff
Speaker 1: that's decided upon in court cases, right, It's not It's
Speaker 1: not like that we have an answer right now where
Speaker 1: we could say oh, well, this is clearly X, Y
Speaker 1: or z. This is something that ends up getting decided
Speaker 1: after long drawing out court cases. And also it could
Speaker 1: even be that we ultimately see something where anything that
Speaker 1: doesn't have any agency of its own, like it doesn't
Speaker 1: have the ability to make decisions on its own in
Speaker 1: a conscious way. It's truly following as close to random
Speaker 1: action as you can determine. It may end up being
Speaker 1: that if it makes contact and purchases illegal things, that
Speaker 1: the accountability shifts to the person doing the selling of
Speaker 1: that illegal substance and not necessarily the buying, although again
Speaker 1: there's also the question of what do you do? What
Speaker 1: did the people you know, wherever that stuff went to,
Speaker 1: what do the people do with that? In this case,
Speaker 1: we're talking about art and art show right right, and
Speaker 1: that complicates it even further. So there are a few
Speaker 1: opinions that came across. In the Guardian, they had an
Speaker 1: article about this event, and the writer of the Guardian
Speaker 1: article got a statement from somebody in great written from
Speaker 1: the National Crime Agency who basically said that this kind
Speaker 1: of thing would have to be assessed on a case
Speaker 1: by case basis. It's so weird and unusual that you
Speaker 1: you kind of have to would just look at the
Speaker 1: individual circumstances. Though, as things like this become more common,
Speaker 1: it seems like it would be harder to try to
Speaker 1: make up a new way to apply the law every
Speaker 1: time you see a case like this. Yeah. Well, well,
Speaker 1: I'm sure that eventually the law would catch up. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Fusion dot Net also had a good article about this
Speaker 1: where they talked to a University of Washington law professor
Speaker 1: named Ryan Callo about the legal outcome of such a situation,
Speaker 1: and and Calo made an interesting distinction between the way
Speaker 1: the law is written. And so Calo was talking about
Speaker 1: the difference between laws that are written in such a
Speaker 1: way that they explicitly punished reckless behavior versus laws that
Speaker 1: explicitly call out intent. And that's how it is in
Speaker 1: the United States. So, in other words, if if I
Speaker 1: were to create a program that would specifically go out
Speaker 1: and find illegal drugs, that's very clear there's an intent there.
Speaker 1: If I create a program that it doesn't discriminate on
Speaker 1: whatever is being sold and therefore could buy illegal drugs,
Speaker 1: or it could buy a bunch of e books of
Speaker 1: Lord of the Rings, then that would fall more under
Speaker 1: the reckless behavior depending upon what environment I set that
Speaker 1: shop bought out in. So, in other words, if the
Speaker 1: phrasing of the statute itself, sure, Yeah. If the if
Speaker 1: the statute is to guard against reckless behavior, and I
Speaker 1: release a random shop bought into a target rich environment
Speaker 1: in which there's a lot of illegal activity going on,
Speaker 1: there's a there's definitely an argument to be made that
Speaker 1: I was acting recklessly and therefore m AM liable in
Speaker 1: that sense, Whereas if it were more on the intent side,
Speaker 1: that would be a lot harder to argue. Yeah. Another
Speaker 1: thing I wanted to read a specific sentence from a
Speaker 1: quote from Calo was that he said, wanting a bad
Speaker 1: outcome doesn't make it illegal. You cannot wish someone to death,
Speaker 1: But purposefully leaving the bot in the dark net until
Speaker 1: it yielded contraband seems hard to distinguish from intent. Right. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, if you were to look at the
Speaker 1: let's let's let's say that we were able to see
Speaker 1: a full timeline of this project from the point when
Speaker 1: they the programmers released the shop bought to the point
Speaker 1: when they conclude their experiment. If that experiment were to
Speaker 1: go on for several weeks, and it only stopped after
Speaker 1: the shop bought bought the drugs. That at least is
Speaker 1: somewhat suspicious because it looks and it may not be
Speaker 1: the case, but it looks like they were waiting for
Speaker 1: it to get one of these hits and then they said,
Speaker 1: all right, we got We wanted to stop it, but
Speaker 1: we I don't know what timeline was you gave me
Speaker 1: that when you gave that list of things that it bought.
Speaker 1: I don't necessarily know that that was chronological. Oh no, no,
Speaker 1: I put the M D M A tablets last for effect.
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know in what order they arrived that.
Speaker 1: You might actually be able to find that out on
Speaker 1: their blog though. And if it were something like in
Speaker 1: week three that hit, you know, I ended up purchasing
Speaker 1: the drugs and then they continued for another six weeks,
Speaker 1: then you could say, well, there's no you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's harder to say that that was specifically what they
Speaker 1: were trying to achieve because it kept on going and
Speaker 1: the selection involves more than just this one hit on
Speaker 1: illicit substances. Yeah. Well, one of the creators actually gave
Speaker 1: a statement to The Guardian where they said that we
Speaker 1: are the legal owner of the drugs, were responsible for
Speaker 1: everything the bot does as we executed the code. But
Speaker 1: this was the qualification, one of the creators said. But
Speaker 1: our lawyer and the Swiss constitution says art in the
Speaker 1: public interest is allowed to be free, which is kind
Speaker 1: of a totally separate issue. Yeah. It's almost like we
Speaker 1: gotta get out of jail free card because this is
Speaker 1: done in the name of art, which I think can
Speaker 1: only go so far. Yeah. Well, yeah, because in January,
Speaker 1: after the exhibit concluded, the artists uploaded an announcement to
Speaker 1: their blog and they basically explained that Swiss officials had
Speaker 1: seized their exhibit, so they came in that they announced
Speaker 1: that the authorities came in and they confiscated the exhibit.
Speaker 1: Presumably they said to impede this is a quote, to
Speaker 1: impede and endangerment of third parties through the drugs exhibited
Speaker 1: by destroying them. Yeah, saying that we are convinced that
Speaker 1: is an objective of art to shed light on the
Speaker 1: fringes of society and to pose fundamental contemporary questions. I'm
Speaker 1: curious what contemporary questions they were posing. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: on one hand, they may have been intending to bring
Speaker 1: up this very question we're discussing today, and that is
Speaker 1: what I suspect overall, in which case they got an answer,
Speaker 1: so mission achieved. So I mean, if the Swiss authorities
Speaker 1: waited until after the exhibit was basically over, then I
Speaker 1: say good on all parties, Like you know, it's they
Speaker 1: They stopped the illegal behavior before it could cause potential
Speaker 1: harm to anyone um and also let us have this
Speaker 1: wonderful discussion about drugs and robots. Yeah. Well, there's another
Speaker 1: story that came out just in the past few months
Speaker 1: that's kind of similar. So in February, a Twitter account
Speaker 1: named either jeff e Books or jeff ree Books. I've
Speaker 1: seen both. I think maybe one is the handle and
Speaker 1: one is the name on it. But it was a
Speaker 1: Twitter account. I'll call it jeff e Books because of
Speaker 1: my love for horse e Books, which I think it
Speaker 1: might be a play on. A Twitter account called jeff
Speaker 1: e Books was used to make a statement that sounded
Speaker 1: like a death threat. So, while the owner of the
Speaker 1: account was at a fashion and cosmetics event in Amsterdam,
Speaker 1: the account jeff e Books tweeted, I seriously want to
Speaker 1: kill people. Yep, that that does sound rather threatening. A
Speaker 1: very sad fact about the Internet and humanity is that
Speaker 1: this should come as a surprise to no one that
Speaker 1: a Twitter account made a death threat. But what is
Speaker 1: a surprise was that the Twitter account that made the
Speaker 1: threat was not operated by a human. It was a
Speaker 1: bot account. So I thought, you're gonna say it was
Speaker 1: gonna be a cat. It does sound like what something
Speaker 1: I can. Cats make so many more death threats than humans.
Speaker 1: Their their eyes are just emanating death threats, beaming out.
Speaker 1: Kittens think of nothing but murder all day. But this
Speaker 1: was a butt, So what what was the So it
Speaker 1: was the button meant to just make death threats? No? No,
Speaker 1: no, no no, okay. So it was an account run by
Speaker 1: a piece of software. This is what we mean when
Speaker 1: we say a bot account. And the account was owned
Speaker 1: by a Dutch web developer named Jeffrey vander Goot. But
Speaker 1: Vandergoot did not compose or intend this tweet, and an
Speaker 1: interesting thing happened. The authorities took the online death threat seriously,
Speaker 1: so the police contacted and questioned Vandergoot, and they eventually
Speaker 1: requested that the offending bought account be taken down, and
Speaker 1: it was. But what actually happened. Why did the bot
Speaker 1: do this? Was it like an evil Twitter bought psychopath
Speaker 1: like cats. No, no, it was not programmed to make
Speaker 1: death threats. That was not part of its intention at all.
Speaker 1: It was programmed to cobble together random sentences. Now, why
Speaker 1: would that work and how would it work? Well, do
Speaker 1: you all remember the Facebook app? What would I say? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know this one. Yeah, There's been a bunch
Speaker 1: of things like this over over the past several years
Speaker 1: on the Internet. I remember one from from back in
Speaker 1: live journal days, when it would like something would cobble
Speaker 1: together a live journal post based on a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of your previous live journal posts. Now, I will say it,
Speaker 1: there is something similar to this that I did just
Speaker 1: last night, which was that someone posted a thing on
Speaker 1: Facebook where you use your phone to create a text
Speaker 1: message using the suggested word and you just press it
Speaker 1: twenty times in a row and and it creates a sentence.
Speaker 1: Mine was mine was dark? Mine was I am so
Speaker 1: much for the end of the end of the end
Speaker 1: of the end of the end, like it just repeated
Speaker 1: at that point. So it's apocalyptic in my case, No, no, no, okay,
Speaker 1: So it's beautiful. It's not exactly like that. What would
Speaker 1: I say? Okay, sorry, go ahead, I'm fine, I'm fine,
Speaker 1: I'm just I'm just my my tiny dark heart is
Speaker 1: made very happy by that. I know you like it.
Speaker 1: I can tell you the Facebook app, what would I say?
Speaker 1: It took all of the text that you had entered
Speaker 1: on Facebook over some previous period of time, maybe since
Speaker 1: you had signed up as a corpus. That's like an
Speaker 1: archive of tech, and then it tried to make new
Speaker 1: sentences by rearranging words and phrases. So a couple of
Speaker 1: mine I went back and found when I did this
Speaker 1: years ago. One of mine was to be my life
Speaker 1: we need a book of secret police who work in
Speaker 1: Ecuador and read the users interpretations of warmth. Now I
Speaker 1: remember this thing. The Another one of mine was someday,
Speaker 1: when you're off the force, hand me your badge. Here's
Speaker 1: your badge. Here's the weirdest thing. That's a that's a
Speaker 1: very mercurial. Uh, you know a sergeant right there in
Speaker 1: a police have your badge. Here's your badge. Here's the
Speaker 1: weirdest thing. Though, I was like, that does sound like something.
Speaker 1: Also that The last one I remember is that I had.
Speaker 1: I don't think I could vote for some busy hands.
Speaker 1: I could see you saying that to actually that, I mean,
Speaker 1: it would be a really strange context. But I I
Speaker 1: went and found I went and found this app, and
Speaker 1: and ran a couple of rough just before we came
Speaker 1: into the studio here, and it brought back, Um, all
Speaker 1: three of those sound unspeakably adorable, which is absolutely a
Speaker 1: thing that I would say. I probably have said it before.
Speaker 1: And and another one, Um, if anyone I elbowed in
Speaker 1: the morning, it sounds like you're about to complete the
Speaker 1: thought and then you're just like, yeah, well, a lot
Speaker 1: of them do end up like that. They are these
Speaker 1: fragments because the Facebook app was based on a Markov
Speaker 1: chain generator, which is an algorithmic program that takes fragments
Speaker 1: of sentences from an existing archive of text and then
Speaker 1: it paced them together to try to make sort of
Speaker 1: coherent but random new statements. So, according to a couple
Speaker 1: of reports, the app that generated the offending tweet was
Speaker 1: also of this kind. It was a Markov change generator,
Speaker 1: so it was just taking the corpus of this person's
Speaker 1: account and creating random new statements by mixing and matching
Speaker 1: words and phrases. Here's the even weirder part. When the
Speaker 1: bot account tweeted I seriously want to kill people, it
Speaker 1: was actually in conversation with another Twitter account, also run
Speaker 1: by a bot. So I think this may be the
Speaker 1: first instance of bought on bought crime that I can
Speaker 1: think of, depending on if you count all those like
Speaker 1: robot combat TV shows from the two thousands. I also
Speaker 1: think it indicates that even bots find bots incredibly irritating.
Speaker 1: Although actually the Jeff e Book's account was not in
Speaker 1: any real way tweeting an accidental death threat at the
Speaker 1: other bot. I mean they were both bots just programmed
Speaker 1: to respond with random messages when tweeted out by a stranger,
Speaker 1: so they were basically playing spam tennis. Anyway, back to
Speaker 1: Vandergoot being interrogated by the police for a random tweet
Speaker 1: generated by a bot that I don't Vandergoot didn't even
Speaker 1: create this spot, by the way, must be strange statement
Speaker 1: given to the Guardian. Vandergoot said, I told the police
Speaker 1: that I can technically see that it would be my
Speaker 1: responsibility since I started the bot and it's basically tweeting
Speaker 1: under my name. However, it is a random generator. So yes,
Speaker 1: it's possible that something bad can come out of it,
Speaker 1: but to treat it as if I made the threat
Speaker 1: does not make sense to me. I feel very conflicted
Speaker 1: about it. I can see their point, but it does
Speaker 1: not feel right to me that the random output of
Speaker 1: a program can be considered something I said. Yeah, I can,
Speaker 1: I mean, I can certainly see how you would who
Speaker 1: you could argue like, these are not my words. However,
Speaker 1: there's also the argument of well, yeah, I did allow
Speaker 1: this thing to to tweet out. I I enabled it.
Speaker 1: But then you know, but there's that the same as
Speaker 1: as that the same as actually making the threat. Well, well,
Speaker 1: I mean again, I would say that if it came
Speaker 1: to a court case, it would come down to whether
Speaker 1: or not like like like how much harm was actually caused,
Speaker 1: like if that if that bought had tweeted a threat
Speaker 1: like that to an actual human person directly, and the
Speaker 1: human person had had been damaged by that concept, then
Speaker 1: that would be a legally culpable thing. Um, you know.
Speaker 1: And and kudos to the police for tracking down death
Speaker 1: threats on Twitter. That's amazing. That's part of the story
Speaker 1: that Actually I'm most blown away, But and I was
Speaker 1: like what I'm like, yeah, like like round of applause.
Speaker 1: Considering how many stories we've heard about people who have
Speaker 1: had to field this sort of stuff and and the
Speaker 1: lack of response they've had from law enforcement, it is
Speaker 1: rather surprising. Yeah. Well, at any rate, it is you know,
Speaker 1: this is these are very unusual circumstances, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just one of those things again, like you were
Speaker 1: pointing out, Lauren, this is the sort of stuff that
Speaker 1: we don't have the answers for because it is so new.
Speaker 1: It's the kind of stuff that courts are having to
Speaker 1: answer or on the fly. Although this is certainly not
Speaker 1: the only time that two bots have gotten into a
Speaker 1: wacky bot war and caused some kind of mischief. My
Speaker 1: favorite story is not a criminally related story. Uh, it's
Speaker 1: from back in twleven. So these two Amazon bookseller bots
Speaker 1: got into a price war. Um, both were trying to
Speaker 1: sell an out of print copy of a science textbook,
Speaker 1: and one of these bots was programmed to stay one
Speaker 1: point two seven, zero five eight nine times ahead of
Speaker 1: its competitor in price up selling in in order to
Speaker 1: you know, bit banking on the fact that it was
Speaker 1: a large seller and and had good product. It figured
Speaker 1: that it could it could go that many times up
Speaker 1: ahead of its competitor and still sell stuff. The other
Speaker 1: bot was programmed to stay zero point nine nine eight
Speaker 1: three times below the spot, figuring that it could just
Speaker 1: undercut by that much. So the difference here you can
Speaker 1: see if you were to subtract one from the other,
Speaker 1: or or you know, compare them against each other. You
Speaker 1: see there's a bit of a favor on the overside
Speaker 1: compared to the underside. So what happened when these things
Speaker 1: were going up against each other? Um, Eventually a seventy
Speaker 1: dollar textbook wound up being offered for twenty three point
Speaker 1: six million dollars before both sellers realized this thing and
Speaker 1: went oops, is that what all these memes on the
Speaker 1: internet about the price of textbooks are about? I would
Speaker 1: just say that this proves that knowledge is priceless, truly, truly,
Speaker 1: and you are the first target of my pushing robot.
Speaker 1: I'm glad that we have a record of it on
Speaker 1: the podcast. That'll make they'll make the prosecution so much easier. Well,
Speaker 1: we are getting into some really weird territory, yes, I so,
Speaker 1: I for one, in the case of something like the
Speaker 1: Twitter bot uh, from from Vandergoot would not feel comfortable
Speaker 1: holding the owner of this Twitter account liable for what
Speaker 1: the bots said, even if it says something really scary.
Speaker 1: In that case, since it's so random, there's not even
Speaker 1: really uh, I don't know, there's not even a likelihood
Speaker 1: that it would say something like that. It just seems
Speaker 1: like a complete fluke occurrence. Well, and it's a random
Speaker 1: combination of words that could be in any corpus. You
Speaker 1: could also argue, I think pretty effectively that what it
Speaker 1: ultimately is is a very sad commentary on the public
Speaker 1: discourse taking place over things like Twitter, where enough instances
Speaker 1: of this are happening, where that could potentially become something
Speaker 1: tweeted out at random. Like it's it's almost like it
Speaker 1: ends up being social commentary, which of course doesn't help
Speaker 1: you in the individual judgment of who is responsible for
Speaker 1: this in stance. But but but it points to a
Speaker 1: larger problem that goes well beyond artificial intelligence. There, I
Speaker 1: think the best, I mean, the most thorough argument you
Speaker 1: could you can put forth is that it was reckless
Speaker 1: of Vandergoot to put the spot out there. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: I guess maybe somebody might say that I I don't
Speaker 1: know if I feel like that. I kind of don't.
Speaker 1: It just seems like it's such a harmless experiment to
Speaker 1: run a Markov chain on a Twitter account. I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe if you're doing it from a Twitter account that's
Speaker 1: typically full of phrases and words that would make death threats. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean again, if you if you're just it depends
Speaker 1: on from where the corpus corpus comes from. It depends
Speaker 1: on your magnetic poetry set of what winds up being
Speaker 1: set on your fridge. Right. If it's if it ends
Speaker 1: up being the the equivalent of the Cards against Humanity deck,
Speaker 1: then you're just you're just asking for trouble. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know. This is very strange. It's
Speaker 1: just very recently that we've started having technology that has
Speaker 1: the kind of complexity in its behavior that it's difficult
Speaker 1: to trace the output of the technology from the person
Speaker 1: who created or owns it. I mean, typically throughout the
Speaker 1: history of technology, machines have been very have been much
Speaker 1: simpler tools. They very directly affect the will of the
Speaker 1: user or the creator. You know, a gun isn't really
Speaker 1: going it's not likely to surprise you in what it does,
Speaker 1: it's probably going to do what you do with it.
Speaker 1: But if you create an artificially intelligent program, even one
Speaker 1: that's you know, only kind of artificially intelligent in the
Speaker 1: way these things we've been talking about are I don't know,
Speaker 1: you know, it's strange emergent behavior can happen. Yeah, um, certainly,
Speaker 1: things like unintended actions can be a result of that
Speaker 1: sort of thing where uh, it is more complicated than
Speaker 1: you know, pull this lever and this thing happens. Now
Speaker 1: we're talking about there's some form of randomness that's introduced,
Speaker 1: not true randomness because we can't really accomplish that, but
Speaker 1: but some form of behavior that's abstracted from our intentions, right,
Speaker 1: and it can it can be effectively random. It might
Speaker 1: not in the true sense be random, but in every
Speaker 1: you know, practical sense, it is. And that's when we're
Speaker 1: kind of we're kind of working our way back over
Speaker 1: to this idea of autonomous cars because it's a very
Speaker 1: it's it's something we can we can easily talk about
Speaker 1: because it's something that is unfolding right now. Sure, Okay,
Speaker 1: well let's look at autonomous cars. I think we've talked
Speaker 1: about it before, feel free either of you to disagree,
Speaker 1: but I think the three of us are pretty well
Speaker 1: in agreement. From what I recalled that autonomous cars will
Speaker 1: probably mean fewer accidents based upon Google's experience, assuming that
Speaker 1: that would carry true moving forward, I think it's I
Speaker 1: think it's a safe inclusion to say that you know
Speaker 1: there will be fewer accidents. The more autonomous cars we
Speaker 1: have on the road, the more we'll see the accident
Speaker 1: rates decline, right right, uh. And those experiments included If
Speaker 1: you haven't listened to our prior episode a couple of
Speaker 1: years ago now on autonomous cars, um, the two accidents
Speaker 1: that at that time Google Google cars had been in
Speaker 1: there were there were only two of them at the
Speaker 1: time that we recorded that podcast, I haven't heard about anymore,
Speaker 1: and one was one was due to a driver of
Speaker 1: another car hitting the autonomous car, uh, and the second
Speaker 1: was when a person in the autonomous car had taken
Speaker 1: manual control. Right, So pretty good track records so far.
Speaker 1: I think the computers that drive these cars are going
Speaker 1: to be vastly superior to human drivers. The problem is
Speaker 1: you're just not as good a driver as you think
Speaker 1: you are. And yes, that applies to you you think. Yeah,
Speaker 1: other people aren't as good as they think they are.
Speaker 1: You're not as good as you think you are. I'm
Speaker 1: not as good as I think I am. Your problem,
Speaker 1: Your reaction time is never ever going to equal that
Speaker 1: of a computer. It's just it. We have physical limitations
Speaker 1: on it. But that doesn't mean that autonomous cars will
Speaker 1: never have at fault accidents. Yeah, it would be kind
Speaker 1: of it would be kind of foolish to make that statement,
Speaker 1: to say that there will never ever be an accident
Speaker 1: in which an autonomous car was the principal cause. Computers
Speaker 1: can make poor decisions, and when they do, this is
Speaker 1: a big question. Who's liable, the owner, the manufacturer. Could
Speaker 1: we say in some cases, nobody's at fault. It's a
Speaker 1: weird question. Oh, I am sure that insurance companies aren't
Speaker 1: gonna like that last answer. Well, the insurance companies again
Speaker 1: may end up coming up with a brand new model
Speaker 1: specifically for autonomous cars. There's some who are calling for
Speaker 1: that to be the case. Now, granted, we're still at
Speaker 1: least a few years away from autonomous cars becoming a
Speaker 1: consumer product. Yeah, yeah, there there I've seen some predictions
Speaker 1: as early as others. You know, when when when two
Speaker 1: thousand came around, there were people saying, oh, not within
Speaker 1: our lifetimes, and now we're suddenly, oh, within the next
Speaker 1: five years. But one of the people I was reading about,
Speaker 1: he's a lawyer, Frank John Frank Weaver. He posted in
Speaker 1: in Slate about this and said that we might want
Speaker 1: to this is where we might talk about it. Personhood
Speaker 1: extends some concept of personhood to robots and hold the
Speaker 1: robots themselves liable. And thus insurance companies would have specific
Speaker 1: rates for robots, in this case autonomous cars. That would
Speaker 1: mean that if that autonomous car were to cause an accident,
Speaker 1: it would be counted against it in that respect. That's
Speaker 1: how it would be liable was through this insurance. Now
Speaker 1: grant that insurance would be paid by the own or
Speaker 1: of the autonomous vehicle. And the basic argument I've seen
Speaker 1: is that the belief is that the accident rates will
Speaker 1: be very low, so the risk for insurance companies will
Speaker 1: not be that high. Thus, it will actually be attractive
Speaker 1: for insurance companies to do this because they're going to
Speaker 1: make way more on premiums than they ever have to
Speaker 1: pay out. So the ideas that for insurance companies this
Speaker 1: is a this is a windfall for them. I have
Speaker 1: feelings about car insurance companies even well, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: there there are a lot of things we could say. Certainly,
Speaker 1: I'll leave it at that. Yeah, I also have feelings,
Speaker 1: but in this in this case, it is an interesting
Speaker 1: concept and saying that, you know, we could extend personhood
Speaker 1: to these autonomous cars and keeping in mind they are
Speaker 1: not intelligent in the way humans are intelligent. Right, they
Speaker 1: are able to sense the environment and react to it,
Speaker 1: but they're not able to compose a thought the way
Speaker 1: humans can. And there's some people who argue, well that
Speaker 1: why would you extend personhood to that? And his reaction
Speaker 1: is that, hey, we already extend the concept of personhood
Speaker 1: to corporations those are not human. Yes, But on the
Speaker 1: other hand, I would think that there is a slight
Speaker 1: disconnect there because corporations, at least in theory, can be punished.
Speaker 1: And this this sort of brings up the question that
Speaker 1: underlies this episode, like what is the purpose of holding
Speaker 1: someone legally accountable? What is the purpose of punishment? And
Speaker 1: I know there are lots of sort of philosophical theories
Speaker 1: about there when people differ, but I think a really
Speaker 1: common answer you'd here today is that the purpose of
Speaker 1: punishment is deterrence. You want to discourage people from committing
Speaker 1: crimes by saying, well, if you do commit a crime,
Speaker 1: of bad things going to happen to you, all right,
Speaker 1: and and a corporation has just as much power to
Speaker 1: observe that, and go, I guess we won't do that
Speaker 1: thing as a single person does, because that corporation is
Speaker 1: being non randomly, completely on purpose. We all cross our
Speaker 1: fingers and hope every day run by people. Right, Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the thing. Now this is another problem. Like again,
Speaker 1: in practice, you might say that corporations can't be held
Speaker 1: sufficiently accountable, but at least in theory they are supposed
Speaker 1: to be held accountable. They can be punished by the law.
Speaker 1: Well in this case, here's here's My perspective is that
Speaker 1: if we're talking about damages, like, for example, the au
Speaker 1: Thomas car collides with another vehicle, then in that case,
Speaker 1: I think people would argue that the insurance the liability
Speaker 1: of the Automas car would be on the Automas car itself.
Speaker 1: The insurance would cover it. That would all be handled
Speaker 1: in a very in a civil way, not as in
Speaker 1: civilized but in non criminal civil courts, civil court, Whereas
Speaker 1: if it were something that was more serious. Let's say
Speaker 1: that it was an accident involving an autonomous car and
Speaker 1: a passenger or a bicyclist, or that there were injuries
Speaker 1: that were a result of this, and it would have
Speaker 1: been something that should it had been a human driver
Speaker 1: behind the wheel, it would have been a case of
Speaker 1: vehicular manslaughter or some other criminal act. In that case,
Speaker 1: I would argue that it would be most likely the
Speaker 1: courts would be looking into whether or not the manufacturer
Speaker 1: of the vehicle had in fact created a defective product,
Speaker 1: and therefore it would become more of a defective product
Speaker 1: state issue and less of fault or no. And it
Speaker 1: seems in this case that the same principle we've been
Speaker 1: observing throughout this podcast in in our hypothetical examples applies again.
Speaker 1: The simpler the instructions this machine is following, the easier
Speaker 1: it is to establish whether the creator or whatever is
Speaker 1: guilty right once the instruction, When the behavior becomes more
Speaker 1: and more complex, where it's more and more difficult to
Speaker 1: look at the code and predict exactly what this thing
Speaker 1: would do in any given scenario, I don't know it's
Speaker 1: it's again. I think that it would come down to
Speaker 1: two potentially criminal negligence, probably civil negligence, because I believe
Speaker 1: that most of the time, when um, for example, a
Speaker 1: air bag malfunctions and injures a passage in a car, UM,
Speaker 1: that's usually settled out of court. It's it's all, it's
Speaker 1: a civil matter. It's it's a civil matter. There's not
Speaker 1: There isn't criminal liability in that case, right, right, And
Speaker 1: so I would assume that that based on our current laws,
Speaker 1: new laws are probably going to be written that include
Speaker 1: this kind of civil liability. Yeah. We usually see new
Speaker 1: laws built upon older ones, right, We don't tend to
Speaker 1: see the reinventing of the legal wheel. Yeah. You know.
Speaker 1: It makes me wonder if in the future, as artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence becomes more ubiquitous in our lives, especially in robots,
Speaker 1: things that are actually embodied and can act in society
Speaker 1: and perhaps in your people, are we going to start
Speaker 1: having a legal profession that's like a computer motive analyst,
Speaker 1: someone who is a who is an expert witness in
Speaker 1: court cases to look at source code and tell you
Speaker 1: about the motives of the robot. I'm sure we'll see
Speaker 1: plenty of experts assess intent right, right, right, your honor.
Speaker 1: I do not think that the roomba should be held
Speaker 1: liable for this cat's trauma. Well, the or the person
Speaker 1: who created the room. But yes, well at any rate.
Speaker 1: So so, John Frank Weaver was arguing that we extend
Speaker 1: personhood to robots. Uh. Brian Sherwood Jones, who's a design consultant,
Speaker 1: disagreed with that and said that we have to hold
Speaker 1: people accountable for robot mistakes, not to ever have the
Speaker 1: robots have the point where the blame is on the robots,
Speaker 1: because his argument was otherwise, it means that you have
Speaker 1: a mass evasion of responsibility. That being said that, if
Speaker 1: if if I were to investigate this, and I were
Speaker 1: to find that the designers, the engineers, the programmers, everyone
Speaker 1: did their due diligence and did their absolute best, and
Speaker 1: in all the testing there was never any indication that
Speaker 1: some sort of emergent behavior could result in this. How
Speaker 1: do I do I just end up saying, well, this
Speaker 1: is a this is a this is a faultless situation
Speaker 1: where someone was uh injured or damage was done to
Speaker 1: property or whatever, but there's no one at fault. I
Speaker 1: mean I guess that would be the only other conclusion
Speaker 1: you could draw. Well, you could, I mean, this would
Speaker 1: be a very weird scenario, but you could start to
Speaker 1: think about once we achieve truly sophisticated artificial intelligence that
Speaker 1: sufficiently abstracted from the intentions of the creators, would we
Speaker 1: have to think about the robots that had this kind
Speaker 1: of intelligence as like forces of nature, the way we
Speaker 1: treat a tornado or a wild animal or so, so
Speaker 1: we would say it's an active bot. Yeah, got you.
Speaker 1: You know a good idea. Let's create like a cascading
Speaker 1: series of laws that dictate how robots should behave in
Speaker 1: order to prevent them from ever causing harm to humans, property,
Speaker 1: or each other. Hey, but we saw some emergent behavior
Speaker 1: in Asimov, didn't we what it looks? All I did
Speaker 1: was read the laws. I didn't bother to read the stories.
Speaker 1: It's not true, and those are flawed on purpose to
Speaker 1: make stories interesting. Actually it is. It is a great
Speaker 1: example of exactly what we're talking about. This is something
Speaker 1: that has been bandied about in science fiction for decades
Speaker 1: very well, and and it's it was very prescient because
Speaker 1: it turns out that we're now on the cusp of
Speaker 1: having to actually create the legislation that will guide us
Speaker 1: in the years ahead, and ultimately, if we said, all right,
Speaker 1: was this look like twenty years from now, It's very
Speaker 1: hard to say because we're still in that earliest of phases.
Speaker 1: But it is fun to talk about, and it's becoming
Speaker 1: necessary at this point. We've already seen some examples that
Speaker 1: show how necessary this is. It's just gonna get more
Speaker 1: necessary as time goes on. Any last thoughts, Um, we
Speaker 1: are not lawyers and do not offer official legal counsel
Speaker 1: or unofficial legal counsel to say, yeah, we probably should
Speaker 1: have put that at the front, but maybe we will. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe we'll just have that preface each episode. Uh,
Speaker 1: this has actually been a ton of fun to talk about, Joe,
Speaker 1: you were the one to suggest this topic and it
Speaker 1: was amazing, So thank you very much. UM. And of
Speaker 1: course we're getting great suggestions from you listeners out there,
Speaker 1: and we want to encourage you to continue sending those
Speaker 1: suggestions in We love to hear from you, We love
Speaker 1: to hear your thoughts on the subjects we cover, and
Speaker 1: of course we are happy to cover the topics you
Speaker 1: suggest in episodes as well, So in upcoming episodes. Your
Speaker 1: suggestion could be one we talk about. We'll we'll give
Speaker 1: you a shout out and everything, so you should send
Speaker 1: us an email if you have any suggestions or questions
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