net.wars

"My iPhone won't stab me in my bed," Bill Smart said at the first We Robot, attempting to explain what was different about robots - but eight years on, We Robot seems less worried about that than about the brains of the operation. That is, AI, which conference participant Aaron Mannes described as, "A pile of math that can do some stuff".

But the math needs data to work on, and so a lot of the discussion goes toward possible consequences: delivery drones displaying personalized ads (Ryan Calo and Stephanie Ballard); the wrongness of researchers who defend their habit of scraping publicly posted data by saying it's "the norm" when their unwitting experimental subjects have never given permission; the unexpected consequences of creating new data sources in farming (Solon Barocas, Karen Levy, and Alexandra Mateescu); and how to incorporate public values (Alicia Solow-Neiderman) into the control of...well, AI, but what is AI without data? It's that pile of math. "It's just software," Bill Smart (again) said last week. Should we be scared?

The answer seems to be "sometimes". Two types of robots were cited for "robotic space colonialism" (Kristen Thomasen), because they are here enough and now enough for legal cases to be emerging. These are 1) drones, and 2) delivery robots. Mostly. Mason Marks pointed out Amazon's amazing Kiva robots, but they're working in warehouses where their impact is more a result of the workings of capitalism that that of AI. They don't scare people in their homes at night or appropriate sidewalk space like delivery robots, which Paul Colhoun described as "unattended property in motion carrying another person's property". Which sounds like they might be sort of cute and vulnerable, until he continues: "What actions may they take to defend themselves?" Is this a new meaning for move fast and break things?

Colhoun's comment came during a discussion of using various forecasting methods - futures planning, design fiction, the futures wheel (which someone suggested might provide a usefully visual alternative to privacy policies) - that led Cindy Grimm to pinpoint the problem of when you regulate. Too soon, and you risk constraining valuable technology. Too late, and you're constantly scrambling to revise your laws while being mocked by technical experts calling you an idiot (see 25 years of Internet regulation). Still, I'd be happy to pass a law right now barring drones from advertising and data collection and damn the consequences. And then be embarrassed; as Levy pointed out, other populations have a lot more to fear from drones than being bothered by some ads...

The question remains: what, exactly do you regulate? The Algorithmic Accountability Act recently proposed by Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) would require large companies to audit machine learning systems to eliminate bias. Discrimination is much bigger than AI, said conference co-founder Michael Froomkin in discussing Alicia Solow-Neiderman's paper on regulating AI, but special to AI is unequal access to data.

Grimm also pointed out that there are three different aspects: writing code (referring back to Petros Terzis's paper proposing to apply the regime of negligence laws to coders); collecting data; and using data. While this is true, it doesn't really capture the experience Abby Jacques suggested could be a logical consequence of following the results collected by MIT's Moral Machine: save the young, fit, and wealthy, but splat the old, poor, and infirm. If, she argued, you followed the mandate of the popular vote, old people would be scrambling to save themselves in parking lots while kids ran wild knowing the cars would never hit them. An entertaining fantasy spectacle, to be sure, but not quite how most of us want to live. As Jacques tells it, the trolley problem the Moral Machine represents is basically a metaphor that has eaten its young. Get rid of it! This was a rare moment of near-universal agreement. "I've been longing for the trolley problem to die," robotics pioneerRobin Murphy said. Jacques herself was more measured: "Philosophers need to take responsibility for what happens when we leave our tools lying around."

The biggest thing I've learned in all the law conferences I go to is that law proceeds by analogy and metaphor. You see this everywhere: Kate Darling is trying to understand how we might integrate robots into our lives by studying the history of domesticating animals; Ian Kerr and Carys Craig are trying to deromanticize "the author" in discussions of AI and copyright law; the "property" in "intellectual property" draws an uncomfortable analogy to physical objects; and Hideyuki Matsumi is trying to think through robot registration by analogy to Japan's Koseki family registration law.

Getting the metaphors right is therefore crucial, which explains, in turn, why it's important to spend so much effort understanding what the technology can really do and what it can't. You have to stop buying the images of driverless cars to produce something like the "handoff model" proposed by Jake Goldenfein, Deirdre Mulligan, and Helen Nissenbaum to explore the permeable boundaries between humans and the autonomous or connected systems driving their cars. Similarly, it's easy to forget, as Mulligan said in introducing her paper with Daniel N. Kluttz, that in "machine learning" algorithms learn only from the judgments at the end; they never see the intermediary reasoning stages.

So metaphor matters. At this point I had a blinding flash of realization. This is why no one can agree about Brexit. *Brexit* is a trolley problem. Small wonder Jacques called the Moral Machine a "monster".

Previous We Robot events as seen by net.wars: 2018 workshop and conference; 2017; 2016 workshop and conference, 2015; 2013, and 2012. We missed 2014.

Illustrations: The Moral Labyrinth art installation, by Sarah Newman and Jessica Fjeld, at We Robot 2019; Google driverless car.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.