Law & Emerging Technologies (LAW-795EM-001)
Kenneth Anderson
Meets: 01:00 PM - 02:20 PM (MW) - Warren - Room N101
Enrolled: 23 / Limit: 23
Notices
There are no notices at this time.
Description
This course will consider issues at the intersection of law/regulation/ethics/policy and emerging technologies. It is intended to be a basic course for which no technical knowledge of science or emerging technologies is required.
Although the course begins by surveying emerging technologies across a broad range of both the technologies involved (artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, cyber, virtual and augmented reality, quantum computing, biotechnology, genetic engineering, to mention a few possibilities) and some of the emerging applications that utilize them, the main example and focus of the course will be on AI technologies. AI and its many issues, including regulation and norms, will likely be about 75f% of the course. The goal of the course, with respect to AI technologies and emerging applications, is to help students gain a basic grounding in their concepts and vocabulary – not at a technical engineering level, but at the level appropriate to lawyers engaged in legal or regulatory activities. This constitutes a substantial portion of the course (and will require several quizzes during the semester that are objective, multiple choice or true-false).
The remainder of the course takes up normative questions related to AI as an example of emerging technology. These topics include identifying bodies of law/regulation that already, or are likely to, apply to specific applications of AI (e.g., self-driving vehicles; basic principles (if there are any) that seem likely or useful to structure the application of law to emerging AI technologies; etc. But the course will also consider questions of “institutional design” for law/regulation and AI technologies – governance questions, including who should have legal authority to regulate or take legal actions, etc. In this “governance” context, the course will also (very briefly) look at the business models of the technology firms that are developing and utilizing these technologies.
Given, however, that much of AI technologies in the United States are not so far specifically regulated, or don’t so far have clear bodies of law applied to them by courts, many questions of “norms” and emerging AI technologies are policy in nature at this point. New algorithmic, digital applications in Machine Learning, especially, have raised many important questions for law and regulation, including questions of the accuracy of predictive algorithms, inadvertent or unintended outcomes of machine learning algorithms, etc.(e.g., racially biased algorithms). The course will briefly look at how other jurisdictions, such as the EU, have approached some of these issues.
Finally, the course will conclude with questions of the “law” can get the questions of norms and regulation “right” – finding the right legal analogies, for example – and a consideration of how the core questions of norms can be deeply affected by cultural understandings of such concepts as “robots,” “intelligence” and “AI.”
This is an introductory, survey course, intended to introduce students to the basic issues of norms and institutional governance of emerging technologies, specifically AI, and so the course examines many topics quite briefly.
Assessment will consist of a final take-home exam with (i) a question(s) asking how certain bodies of existing law (e.g., products liability) might apply to an AI application (e.g., an AI-enabled self-driving vehicle) and (ii) a policy essay question. There will also be several required vocabulary/concepts quizzes during the course of the term. (At this point, this is not a paper or ULWR course; if the number of signups is small, then a paper option will be included, including ULWR supervision. However, Professor Anderson is happy to also supervise any ULWR paper outside the regular final exam context, if the formal paper option is not offered.)
The course is new – a syllabus will be posted, but students should anticipate that it will be revised several times during the term, as both professor and students learn what works and what doesn’t in a new and non-traditional course. Please be in touch with Professor Ken Anderson with any questions.
Textbooks and Other Materials
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First Class Readings
Not available at this time.