2016 Sidley Austin Distinguished Lecture on Big Data Law and Policy: The Three Laws of Robotics in the Age of Big Data

Abstract

These three laws have been very influential, and even today people imagine what it would be like-or whether it would even be possible-to build them into robots, including, for example, into self-driving cars. 4s a dramatic device, the laws of robotics replaced one familiar trope about robots with a far more interesting one.The older trope was the idea of the Frankenstein monster or the killer robot, which becomes evil or goes berserk.An example of this literary theme in the Terminator movie franchise is the neural network Skynet becoming self-aware and taking over the world. 5But Asimov wrote his robot stories to counteract what he called the "Frankenstein Complex"-the idea that robots were inherently menacing or evil, and that human beings would inevitably create mechanical beings who would turn on their creators. 6In many of his stories, in fact, people start out as prejudiced against robots and then end up seeing their value.For example, the protagonist of several of his stories, Detective Elijah Bailey, who is initially skeptical of robots, eventually becomes best friends with R. Daneel Olivaw, his robotic partner. 7y creating the three laws, Asimov made things much more interesting.Instead of just worrying about whether robots would eventually turn on us, he raised an additional problem that is very near and dear to lawyers-this is the problem of legal interpretation.What do we-or in some cases, the robots themselves-do when the laws are unclear, or when they conflict?By creating the three laws, Asimov moved our imagination about robots from threats to objects of interpretation and regulation, and thus sources of irony and conflict.It is a very sophisticated idea, and one that he develops in many of his stories.Today, it's quite unclear whether we could actually build the three laws that Asimov postulated into robots and artificial intelligence (AI) agents.After all, Asimov's three laws seem rather vague and incomplete.They might have loopholes.