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C O N T A C T

Dr. Ian Kerr holds the University of Ottawa LogoCanada Research Chair in Ethics, Law and Technology at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law. He also holds cross- appointments to the Faculty of Medicine and the Department of Philosophy.

e-mail icon iankerr(at)uottawa(dot)ca

 telephone icon telephone:
  613-562-5800 ext. 3281

 fax icon fax:
  613-562-5124

 mail box icon post:
  57 Louis Pasteur St.
  P.O. Box 450, Stn.A
  Ottawa, Ontario
  K1N 6N5


K E R R P O D

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I D  T R A I L

ID Trail ThumbOn the Identity Trail
understanding the importance and impact of anonymity and authentication in a networked society

M Y  P O D C A S T S

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L O G I N

S E A R C H


Robot law is taking over

Amazon's ironic decision to delete Kindle users' copies of 1984 shows the old rules about copyright, ownership and privacy don't apply to today's technology

 
By Ian Kerr, Citizen Special  September 15, 2009

 

A little over a year ago, in one of the most important privacy cases ever heard by the Supreme Court of Canada, Justice Ian Binnie sought to allay concerns that we are sleepwalking into a surveillance society with the following remark: "On these occasions, critics usually refer to 'Orwellian dimensions' and 1984, but the fact is that 1984 came and went without George Orwell's fears being entirely realized, although he saw earlier than most the direction in which things might be heading."

Like most judicial pronouncements with staying power, I still haven't quite figured out what he meant by this. Was the judge simply saying that the worries expressed by privacy advocates are sometimes overblown? Or was his clever, lawyerly use of the word "entirely" a tongue-in-cheek expression of genuine concern?

Either way, Justice Binnie's remark has caused me to wonder what it would take to say that Orwell's fears are "entirely realized."

I am guessing the threshold must be rather high.

After all, Orwell conjectured about a world that even David Lynch would agree is wild-at-heart-and-weird-on-top. It wasn't just about big brother, doublethink or the telescreen. There was also that crazy stuff about The Ministry of Truth and its ability to make information appear and disappear on a whim. As Orwell described it:

"This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs -- to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date."

Powerful stuff, 1940s science fiction is.

Skip forward exactly 60 years to the summer of 2009. There I was on a perfect July day at the Universitat de Barcelona, about to launch into my first lecture on Isaac Asimov's Laws of Robotics. Just before I did so, a law student from Puerto Rico interjected, asking me about the device that I was using to read my lecture notes.

"Its called an iLiad," I said.

"Is that the same thing as a Kindle?" she asked, referring to Amazon.com's increasingly popular e-book reader.

"Nope," I said. "Apples and Oranges. The Kindle was designed first and foremost as a distribution vehicle for Amazon books, so its architecture is a proprietary system that uses digital rights management (DRM) to tether the downloaded content to the device, preventing copies from being easily made or transferred to other readers or machines. My iLiad, on the other hand, is an open source device that uses a Linux operating system, allowing anyone with know-how (not me!) to tinker with it and to create applications that improve its functionality for the broader community of users. I didn't buy my e-reader to download and consume popular novels. I chose the iLiad because it allows me to access a broader range of research documents, not to mention greater control over the information stored on my device."

It never really occurred to me at the time just how central my somewhat geeky response to that seemingly random question would be to the course itself, with its lofty ambition of examining how our philosophical conceptions of the law and our corresponding policy approaches change in the face of autonomic computing and robotics.

My lecture that day was an introduction to Asimov's brilliant idea that we can mitigate people's fears about robots (the "Frankenstein Complex") by programming the machines to "obey" certain rules. In essence, his three Laws of Robotics provided a system of automated permissions for what people could and could not do with robots. Instead of developing rules of human conduct and imposing them on people (as law and morality seek to do), the Laws of Robotics were rules designed by humans but programmed directly into the machines. For example, if a human tried to get a robot to injure another person or steal her books, the robot would shut down, refuse or otherwise render itself incapable of carrying out the command. It wasn't easy to convince or trick the robot into wrongdoing. The robot's positronic brain was hard-wired to do no evil.

Not surprisingly, my students loved thinking about the law and rule-following/rule-breaking behaviour through the lens of Asimov's adorable robots -- Speedy, Robbie and George-10. The challenge, of course, was to get them to see that Asimov's approach is by now as much science fact as it is science fiction.

As though by divine providence, a teachable moment was delivered by the Google Alerts robot to my inbox on the morning of my second lecture. Reports were starting to circulate that Amazon had auto-deleted copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from law-abiding Kindle owners. According to the news reports, Amazon mistook a "no" for a "yes" regarding the publisher's decision on e-books. Fearing serious sanction from the copyright owners after selling many e-copies, Amazon capitulated. Using its robotic powers to trespass within the digital libraries of all Kindle customers, Amazon electronically "seized" Orwell's books. It was a classic Orwellian moment -- with a mouse click, The Ministry of Truth expunged the offending material without notice or permission, rectifying a mistaken past by replacing it with a perfected present.

Given that the driver of this news item was copyright, I sent my students the story and asked them to think about how automation technologies will change the way we think about copyright law.

It didn't take long for some of them to point out that the Kindle's DRM shifts the balance between the owner's ability to control and the customer's ability to access or use a work subject to copyright. Even though the end user licence for the Kindle suggests that once you "purchase" an e-book its yours, and even though the copyright in 1984 expired in Canada and several other countries back in 2000 (putting the work back into the public domain), Kindle owners found out the hard way that human laws can be superseded by robotic laws.

This month, Amazon offered to pay for or restore the deleted books and apologized. But the Kindle-1984 SNAFU made it perfectly clear that, marketing aside, electronic books are not the same as paper ones. DRM can be used to change the rules.

As teachable moments go, all of this timed rather nicely with the current events accompanying our third day of class. On July 20, Canada's ministers of Industry, and Canadian Heritage and Official Languages jointly launched nationwide consultations to solicit Canadians' opinions on copyright reform. Specifically, they expressed an interest in knowing how Canadians are affected by copyright laws, how these laws should be modernized in harmony with Canadian values, what reforms would best foster creativity, innovation, competition and investment, and what kind of changes to the law would best position Canada as a leader in the global digital economy.

Although there is a longer story to tell here that is told much better by my brilliant colleague Michael Geist (speakoutoncopyright.ca), suffice it to say that the previous and current approach to copyright reform is misguided. The previous Liberal government tabled Bill C-60, which followed the U.S. approach by including an "anti-circumvention" provision. This approach makes it illegal for you to circumvent or otherwise alter the robotic laws that permitted Amazon to auto-delete 1984. The Conservative government followed suit with Bill C-61, which would have given even greater protection to DRM. It too died on the order page when the first Harper government fell. Finally, two Conservative ministers have been reconsidering these issues under the recent copyright consultation.

During all of this, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, has been grovelling to his consumer base, admitting that its actions were "stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles." He promised that Amazon would "use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward."

What he didn't promise was to remove the DRM or rewrite its robotic laws so that The Ministry of Truth's auto-delete functionality is no longer possible. As blogger Cory Doctorow points out, Amazon also won't tell us much about whatever else is lurking in the Kindle.

I am uncertain whether any of these events meet Justice Binnie's threshold for genuine Orwellian concern. What I do know is that copyright 101 is forever changed. Copyright law in the age of the Kindle is no longer merely about ownership of the means of (re)production. It is also about access to knowledge, personal privacy, the citizen's right to read anonymously and the consumer's right to control the devices that she owns.

When the ministers, having just completed their copyright consultation on Sept. 13, begin to draft new laws projected for the spring of 2010, I hope that they recognize the power of the laws of robotics, reject an approach that would enable The Ministry of Truth, and offer up a legislative regime that truly balances the copyright owners' interests with the rights of citizens, as twice promised.

Ian Kerr holds the Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law and Technology and is a member of the University of Ottawa's new Centre for Law, Technology and Society.

 
MY SUBMISSION TO THE CANADIAN COPYRIGHT CONSULTATION 2009

My name is Ian Kerr.  I am a Full Professor at the University of Ottawa, where I hold a four-way appointment in the Faculties of Law and Medicine, the Department of Philosophy and the School of Information Studies. In 2001, I was awarded the Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law and Technology, the mandate of which included the study of digital copyright reform. This Chair was renewed in 2005. I was also the Principal Investigator of On the Identity Trail, a four-year Collaborative Research Initiative, which received one of the largest ever grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and also included as part of its mandate an investigation of the privacy/identity implications of digital copyright.



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NEW PRIVACY WORLD

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ever since i moved to ottawa, i have been a huge fan of cbc radio . so i was thrilled yesterday to be invited for the 3rd time to appear on the current to talk about our new book, lessons from the identity trail.  below is the text of nancy wilson's introduction followed by a link to the podcast of our interview...

 

To some people the Internet is the world's biggest commons ... a global public square. For others, it's a realm of shadowy, anonymous figures hiding behind online aliases. But anonymity is becoming less and less a feature of life online. We aired a clip with one perspective on that trend, posted last May on the website, Mobuzz.tv.

Taking responsibility for your actions on line may be just one way you relinquish privacy. Every day, millions of Canadians hop on the Internet to check their e-mail, chat with their friends on social networking sites, book a vacation or buy a gift. And each time they click on a purchase or post a picture, they give up a little bit of their privacy.

With this explosion of information technology - there are those who warn that our anonymity and our right to privacy is in jeopardy. That's the premise of a new book called On The Identity Trail: Anonymity, Privacy and Identity in a Networked Society. Academics, governments and private corporations around the world contributed to the book, which examines how technology is changing the nature of our private lives, and what it means to be "anonymous."

Dr. Ian Kerr is the lead author of the book. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law and Technology at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law. He was in Ottawa.

The book can be downloaded from the internet for free.

The podcast of the interview is available here .
 
LESSONS FROM THE IDENTITY TRAIL LAUNCHED

Last week, members from ID Trail gathered for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada's Privacy Lecture Series to launch their new book Lessons From the Identity Trail. The event, which enjoyed an over-capacity turn out, resulted in extensive media coverage across Canada, including an opinion editorial by Ian Kerr and Valerie Steeves in the Ottawa Citizen and broader coverage by the National Post, CBC, CTV, the Edmonton Journal, the Montreal Gazette, the Ottawa Sun and the Ottawa Citizen.

Well deserved shout-outs are owed to Amanda Leslie, Anne-Marie Hayden and Jill Pyle for organizing an impressive event !

Special thanks to the very talented Mark Blevis for providing a podcast of the event, which can be downloaded here .


   


 

 
LESSONs FROM THE IDENTITY TRAIL BOOK LAUNCH
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On Wednesday April 8, 2009 members of the ID Trail project will re-assemble to launch their new book, Lessons from the Identity Trail. 

The launch will take place as part of the Office of the Privacy Commisioner of Canada 's Lecture Series at noon in the Albert Salon at the Marriott Hotel, 100 Kent Street (here is a map). At this session, Ian Kerr and Valerie Steeves will offer readings from the book, published by Oxford University Press.

If you plan on attending, please RSVP This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

The ID Trail is proud to announce that the book will also available online by way of a creative commons licence.

The online version will be released in three parts on April 8, April 28, and May 6.

Stay tuned for more information.

 
DREAMIN’ MAN: the role of idealism and pragmatisms in privacy advocacy

on june 19th, i had the good fortune of being invited to give a dinner speech to all of the speakers at UofA’s annual access and privacy conference, performing at the speed of change.  although i fully understood the drill – they wanted a lighthearted and entertaining  20 minute speil – something happened to me on the plane that turned into a jerry mcguire moment. i decided instead to take a more heartfelt look at a difficult and often unaddressed set of issues in privacy advocacy.

many people who attended have urged me to post the speech, which i was originally reluctant to do both because it was a kind of off-the-cuff “moment”, and because a better, more rigorous version of it would have avoided its central problem, which is attaching only a few faces to the various positions rather than surveying a wide variety of people and positions. i reiterate here that none of this was ever meant to be about the people espousing the positions, rather to use famous examples in order to raise interesting and important questions about the appropriate roles of idealism and pragmatism.

ontario information and privacy commissioner ann cavoukian was kind enough to provide me with some very useful feedback on my ideas in spite of the fact that some of my remarks about her position were critical and, as i put it in the address, “visceral”. she is a total mensch.

among many other things, she warned me about the danger of citing the statistics reported by edward greenspan, which she claims are in “wild dispute” and, in some cases, “unequivocally incorrect”.  ann also rightly pointed out that my general argument about the politics inherent in some technologies cuts both ways and will therefore work against idealist approaches in many circumstances as well. she also suggested that “privacy by design” can be used in some cases to re-design the politics of technological systems. 

i decided not to alter the original text and am trying to decide whether my jerry mcguire moment ought to be transformed into an academic study. let me know what you think !!

if you would like to read the original text, it is here

for those interested in listening to the speech, you can find it here


 

   

 

 
Searching for the right balance
We can reasonably be suspicious of sliding standards for subjecting Canadian citizens to searches by sniffer dogs -- or the next detection technology
 
Ian Kerr
Ottawa Citizen Special

While the Supreme Court put some restrictions on searches last week, it left the door open for the electronic 'noses' of the future, which can operate much more conspicuously and effectively than snoop dogs, writes Ian Kerr.
CREDIT: Pierre Obendrauf, Montreal Gazette
While the Supreme Court put some restrictions on searches last week, it left the door open for the electronic 'noses' of the future, which can operate much more conspicuously and effectively than snoop dogs, writes Ian Kerr.

Last Friday, the Supreme Court of Canada released two important privacy-related decisions, both addressing an increasing trend in which Canadian law enforcement agencies use police dogs to conduct random searches of public spaces.

The first case took place at the Calgary bus terminal, where law enforcement officers had initiated a dog patrol. After getting off a 15-hour, all-nighter Greyhound trip from Vancouver, Gurmakh Kang-Brown was said to have aroused suspicion because of an "elongated stare" that he gave to an undercover officer who had been following him around the station. After the perceived staring incident and some to-ing and fro-ing within the bus station, a brief discussion ensued and ultimately a pooch named "Chevy" was brought over for a quick snoop. Chevy hadn't come to the bus terminal in anticipation of Mr. Kang-Brown's arrival; he wasn't a known suspect, nor was anyone else in the terminal. Chevy was there as part of a formal program to snoop-out anyone whom her handlers thought looked a certain way.

The second case involved an unknown teenager who wasn't even on the scene when the police opened his knapsack in the gym at St. Pat's High in Sarnia. His knapsack was left there, unattended, because the entire school had been locked-down to facilitate the police and a trusty K9 named "Chief." After sweeping the hallways and lockers, Chief and his handlers headed to the gym where he snooped the kid's bag, immediately indicating the presence of an odour of narcotics.

The officers had not been tailing the teen, known as A.M., as a "person of interest." They simply took up a standing invitation from the school's principal one year prior to search the school any time they wished, without warning or cause, in support of the school's zero-tolerance policy against drugs.

"In the sniffer dog business," opined Supreme Court Justice Ian Binnie, "there are many variables."


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OSCAR PISTORIUS'S NEW NORMAL
do oscar pistorius's prosthetic legs make him faster? that probably depends on whether you take two-leggedness as the baseline
 
ottawa citizen, january 16, 2008

he who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

- nietzsche

in a few minutes, it will be midnight. I am sitting on the balcony of my rented san juan apartment. I just finished reading the IAAF report thwarting the olympic ambitions of oscar pistorius, the south african sprinter whose spirit has captured the imagination of the 24 students I am here to teach.

we started our three-week exchange seven days ago in ottawa, where 12 of my university of ottawa law students hosted 12 students from universidad de puerto rico. together, these two dozen outstanding students are enrolled in a course that I call "building better humans?" (please note the question mark in the title.)

one of the goals of this interdisciplinary course is to illuminate the murky line between therapy and enhancement in a world that seems to be drifting from "natural selection" toward what bioethicist john harris calls "deliberate selection."

what happens to people when science and technology are aggressively used to alter the human condition? what does the future hold for health and humanity as we move from Darwinian evolution to self-directed enhancement medicine?

in this three-week course, we are tackling such questions and thinking about whether or how to regulate emerging health enhancements in light of an evolution that operates at an exponential rather than a glacial pace.

mr. pistorius was previously unknown to most of my students.

but he is now poised to become a household name before the olympic torch lights the stage in beijing.

when oscar was born without fibulas 21 years ago, his parents had to make a difficult decision shortly before his first birthday: should they conform to societal norms by way of a medical intervention that would amputate both of his legs at the knee so that he could be fitted for prosthetic limbs? Or should they leave him with the legs he was born with, thus affirming his vari-ability? without knowing that bionics would, within a mere 20 years, transform from science fiction to science "fact," and without knowing that their son would become known as "the fastest man on no legs," they chose the route of medical intervention.

two decades later, and right around the time that the sports world began watching mr. pistorius close in on olympic qualifying times, the IAAF (international association of athletics federations) released rule 144.2, which prohibits the use of "any technical device that incorporates springs, wheels or any other element that provides the user with an advantage over another athlete not using such a device." the rule was meant to ensure that the olympics remain "pure" -- that the competition remained between athletes and not between sports equipment manufacturers.

not long after the promulgation of 144.2, mr. pistorius sought confirmation that his carbon fibre prosthetics -- without which he could not compete -- did not run afoul of the rule. on monday, three days after I studied the issue with my students, the IAAF released its decision: mr. pistorius is now the fastest man on two springs.

the IAAF decision was based on an "independent scientific study," a biomechanical and physiological analysis of long sprint running comparing mr. pistorius with five two-legged athletes capable of similar levels of performance. among other things, the so-called "objective results" of this study revealed the following:

(1) "Pistorius was able to run with his prosthetic blades at the same speed as the able-bodied sprinters with about 25 per cent less energy expenditure";

(2) "the ... returned energy from the prosthetic blade is close to three times higher than with the human ankle joint in maximum sprinting"; and

(3) "the mechanical advantage of the blade in relation to the healthy ankle joint of a two-legged athlete is higher than 30 per cent."

on this basis, the IAAF concluded that mr. pistorius's prosthetic legs must be "considered as technical aids in clear contravention of IAAF Rule 144.2."

while it is tempting to jump on the bandwagon along with the many critics who rightly censure the IAAF for its inconsistent approach to what my colleague gregor wolbring has called "technological doping" (for example, pumping oxygen into your blood is prohibited but huffing and puffing in a little tent overnight till you achieve the same effect is not), there is something else that I find extremely curious about the decision.

rule 144.2 seeks to prevent athletes from using technology to gain relational advantages over one another. but as one of my students, ashley, astutely noted in class last week, the outcome of the analysis depends entirely upon which "other athletes" are chosen as the appropriate comparators. applying principles of equality law rather than biomechanics, ashley unpacked a key assumption within the study. although lauded as "objective" and "scientific," the study clearly privileges a certain body type.

those who work in the field of (dis)ability studies are all too familiar with this approach. the medical model upon which it is based imposes biological "norms" as the baseline for any, and all, analysis. through the narrow lens of biomechanics and from the exclusive perspective of two-legged runners, oscar pistorius's "cheetahs" are seen to confer a physiological advantage.

but even gert-peter brueggemann (the scientist who conducted the study) noted last week in an interview with the new york times that his scientific observations did not necessarily translate to a finding of general advantage.

mr. brueggemann, like every other scientist, is well aware that the outcome of every experiment depends entirely on the determination of its control groups. as a young einstein realized in his daydreams during his day job in the patent office, in science, assumptions about one's point of reference are key.

so what would happen if the IAAF had used a different point of reference in the study? instead of presuming two-leggedness as the baseline and then determining whether mr. pistorius deviated significantly from that norm, what if the interpretation of rule 144.2 adopted a relational approach that also took into account the many disadvantages experienced by mr. pistorius (biomechanical and social)?

I suspect that such an approach would not have yielded a result so clear-cut.

while it is important to be fair to the species-normative biological athletes against whom mr. pistorius hopes to compete, it is equally important to be fair to the bionic runners who wish to be able to become olympians, not paralympians. able, not in terms of being fast enough, but in terms of gaining access to the competition.

sports, like the practice of medicine, stands at a crossroad. in each case, it is no longer clear whether to favour natural ability or ultimate performance. as we continue to technologize sports (for that matter, as science continues to seek technological mastery of the body), the deepening merger between human and machine will only make these questions more difficult. as gregor wolbring has asked, once biological runners get "lapped" by their bionic counterparts, will the paralympics become the olympics and vice-versa?

and what does all of this mean for people?
 
MINDING THE MACHINES

amid all the hype about south korea's proposed robot charter, let's not forget the more important question of whether robots should assume human roles in the first place

ottawa citizen, may 4, 2007

a few months ago, as part of its bid to put a robot in every household by 2020, the south korean ministry of commerce, industry and energy announced its intention "to draw up an ethical guideline for the producers and users of robots as well as the robots themselves ..."

responsible computer programming, corporate accountability and consumer protection in the electronics sector -- these are all good things.

pause. rewind. replay.

what? an ethical guideline for the robots themselves?

anticipating an event horizon -- only one bar mitzvah away -- in which intelligent service robots become a part of daily life, the south korean call for a "robot ethics charter" smacks of the science fiction of isaac asimov.

when thinking through the south korean agenda, asimov is definitely worth considering. intentionally or not, his fiction charted a path that has inspired the actual development and implementation of artificial intelligence (AI). asimov was totally underwhelmed by mary shelly's frankenstein and the "dull, hundred-times-told tale" about humanly created, intelligent monsters that will rise up to destroy us. so he constructed a new narrative where robots "were machines designed by engineers, not pseudo-men created by blasphemers."

south korea certainly seems to be taking its cue from asimov's writings, imagining friendly, intelligent robots that are dedicated to helping people. asimov's famous robbie, for example, was a nursemaid tasked with caring for a child who loved the robot like a best friend. asimov went to great pains in his storytelling to normalize robots -- to undo a technophobia he dubbed the "frankenstein complex."

to further ensure that humanity would remain undaunted, the prolific asimov articulated the three laws of robotics that he subsequently described as his most enduring literary contribution. expressed in 61 words and examined in thousands of stories and letters over a period of more than 40 years, asimov imagined what would happen if we were able to embed core morality into machine code and by doing so ensure that "it would never even enter into a robot's mind" to intentionally break the following precepts:

- a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

- a robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except when such orders would conflict with the first law.

- a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law.

leaving aside the thorny philosophical question of whether an AI could ever become a moral agent, it should be relatively obvious from their articulation that asimov's laws are not ethical or legal guidelines for robots but rather about them. the laws are meant to constrain the people who build robots of exponentially increasing intelligence so that the machines remain destined to lives of friendly servitude. the pecking order is clear: robots serve people.

and to the extent that it even contemplates a code "for robots themselves," the korean robot ethics charter is almost certain to follow suit.

it is interesting to ponder asimov's laws in the context of technological development in south korea and elsewhere. for example, could samsung's intelligent surveillance & security guard robot be programmed to correctly resolve the tension between asimov's first and second laws without abandoning its fundamental purpose? funded by the south korean government to overcome the limitations of human soldiers guarding its borders to the north, samsung's machine-gun sentry robots (check 'em out -- they're on YouTube) use precision automation technologies to discriminate friendly from enemy activity and guarantee high shooting accuracy without the need for human presence. what will the SK robot ethics charter say about these?

when I began my academic career a decade ago, the uniform law Conference of canada commissioned me to conduct a study on the far less ominous but related question of how to deal with computers that purport to negotiate and enter into contracts completely independent from human review or interaction. without a law resolving this novelty, there was concern that the future of e-commerce was uncertain. in the years since, as canada research chair in ethics, law and technology at the university of ottawa, i have been gearing up for a book project tentatively titled: minding the machine -- a dual investigation involving: (i) the AI project of putting minds into machines; (ii) the corollary ethical and legal project of designing appropriate prohibitions and oversight mechanisms to mind those machines.

until the silicon hits the sidewalk, i remain doubtful whether south korea's robot ethics charter will match the media hype that it has received. (one author went so far as to style it a "hippocratic oath for androids.")

my skepticism about all of this lies mainly in the subtext. talk about burying the lede! in my view, the south korean agenda has little to do with machine intelligence or roboethics proper. once you sniff your way through the subterfuge of south korea's jetson-esque utopia, you will see that there are two very traditional drivers underlying all of this.

the first driver is financial. for better or worse, the south korean government has identified robotics as a key economic strategy in the coming decades. the BBC and the new york times report that millions of research dollars are being pumped into robotics in south korea. recognizing market saturation for industrial and military robotics, the strategy is to create a global market that does not currently exist -- a market for domestic service robots. south korea is hoping that if they build it, we will come.

the second driver is social. with the lowest birthrate in the world, it is predicted that south korea will face significant workforce shortages in the coming years.

the current strategy for making up the shortfall includes developing service "bots" such as asimov's robbie that can perform a range of domestic chores, and become companions and caregivers for the young and old.

in any case, if you find the idea of using service robots to solve domestic labour issues somewhat exotic, it should be remembered that such proposals have longstanding precedents in north america. a nice example was offered me by a brilliant cyberfeminist colleague in the following corporate slogan from the 1920s: "clothes washing is a task for a machine, not for your wife. turn the hard work into play. buy her a bluebird."

in light of this slogan, it is intriguing to note the first of two central reasons offered to the media for creating the robot ethics charter by one of its drafters. recognizing the concerns that accompany the substitution of robots for people as caregivers and companions, the drafter ponders, "imagine if some people treat androids as if the machines were their wives."

before we spend valuable resources commissioning working groups to invent "no-flirt" rules or other robotic laws to avoid inappropriate human-machine bonding, isn't there a logically prior line of questioning about whether a declining birthrate is truly a problem and, in any event, whether intelligent service robots are the right response?

a headline in the korea times a little over a year ago proclaimed a more intuitive approach: "gender equality essential to addressing low birthrate."

it is no coincidence that the word robot itself derives from robota -- a czech word that connotes involuntary servitude. aristotle was perhaps first to recognize the politics of automation, speculating that "[i]f every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves."

was he right? could robots be a technology of emancipation? or does automation just as easily reinforce existing gender stereotypes and an unjust status quo?

the answer to these questions surely depends on how those robots are designed and used. not just the way they are programmed but, more broadly, the social roles and values that we ascribe to them.

despite my luddite sensibilities, i have always remained a reluctant optimist about the potential of ethically inspired automation technologies, AI and collective intelligence. i am an adamant believer in the general project of roboethics and ethical software design, and i commend much of the excellent research in these fields by groups like the singularity institute for AI and the european robotics research network.

at the same time, i am concerned about robotic laws, charters and other sleight-of-hand that have the potential to misdirect us from the actual domains of ethics and social justice. let us hope that i am mistaken in what i described as the true drivers of the south korean robotics agenda and that its robot ethics charter will exceed its pre-release hype. only time will tell. 

 
FLIP IT FORWARD

way back, on april 9th 2005, i attended one of peter yu’s many excellent conferences: “w(h)ither the middleman?” 

it was a fun event, packed with many of cyberlaw’s rockstars.

i was on the last panel of day two, looking at ‘the future of intermediaries’ along with a great line-up that included ann bartow, rob heverly, dan hunter and david post.

for me, the most inspiring of the talks during the two day event was the one given by ann. she took the question posed in the conference title seriously, choosing to remove the bracketed-h and explaining why gender equality requires us to wither the ‘man’ in the middle.  the publication deriving from this talk is available here, and i highly recommend it as an important diagnostic and prescription for the way we use (and don’t use) the web.  

in her talk, ann provided some possible explanations for why there is not very much legal scholarship devoted to gender issues on the internet and suggested that there is a powerful need for cyberprofs and activists to pay substantially more attention to the gender-based differences in communicative style and substance that have been imported from real space to cyberspace.

ann also shared a number of examples of gender discrimination online and off, including experiences of her own upon her arrival to usc, including her first meeting with a senior male colleague who greeted her with a question: ‘why should the faculty have hired a woman instead of a man to teach ip?’  

she told us that it has since gotten a bit easier, that over time she was able to ‘flip’ this guy (i.e., he came to recognize her contribution to the faculty and her field and he eased-up a little once she was able to ‘prove herself’). 

during the discussion period on our panel – when asked what could be done about all this – ann replied by saying it-would-be-a-great-start if male colleagues would simply add a gender component within the fields of research that they are already conducting. 

i remember dan hunter and others promising that they would. i made a similar promise to myself. while it has taken a lot longer than i had hoped to ramp up my research and although it is still very early in my project, i am happy to finally report to ann and the others in attendance that i have met the challenge.

in furtherance of my own recent work on the relationship between ‘identifiers’ and ‘identity’ (part of my idtrail project), last wednesday, i gave a presentation at uOttawa’s shirley greenberg feminist lunch time workshop series titled “new identifiers for victims of abuse”. 

unfortunately, my talk was more of a description of the project than a finished research product.

if you are interested, the podcast is available here and the powerpoint deck is here

this post is really just to offer my sincere thanks to ann for ‘flipping’ me, and also to challenge dan hunter, greg latowska, and other men who promised they would meet ann’s challenge — as well as all of the other men on this list who didn’t know about ann’s challenge — to  flip-it-forward!

 
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