A new poll shows surprising opinions about the domestic use of small drones. Who should be allowd to fly them, where, and for what purpose? According to the results, Americans may be more trusting of law enforcement than their own neighbors.

Thanks a lot, one person, for sending us in the wrong direction. We’re now talking about locking down platforms and extra regulation just because of one guy.

On Twitter, some of us had this hashtag going, #drunkdrone songs. Remember that Jimmy Buffett lyric, “Why don’t we get drunk and screw?”? My first one was, “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw Up Drone Policy in the United States?”

Billions of dollars are pouring into the latest investor craze: artificial intelligence. But serious scientists like Stephen Hawking have warned that full AI could spell the end of the human race. How seriously should we take the warnings that ever-smarter computers could turn on us? Our expert witnesses explain the threat, the opportunities and how we might avoid being turned into paperclips.

The most famous driverless cars in the world belong to Google. Since 2009, its experiments have clocked more than 750,000 miles on California roads with neither a driver nor an accident. But Google’s cars aren’t alone. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Navlabbuilt their first experimental autonomous vehicle back in 1984. In 2010, a semi-autonomous van built by researchers at the University of Parma drove from Italy to Shanghai and back, a round trip of more than 8,000 miles.

Much of the technology invented for these cars, like adaptive cruise control that applies the brakes when it detects slow traffic ahead, has found its way into mainstream vehicles. The benefit is clear: In normal driving conditions, a car with cameras, radar, and sophisticated software is probably a better driver than you are.

Cars are already close to driving themselves down the highway. How far are we then from military weapons systems that decide on their own when and where to fire?

“You want the scary answer?” asks Clearpath Robotics co-founder and CTO Ryan Gariepy. “We can do it right now, with parts I bought off the Internet.”

Clearpath, a 70-person Canadian firm that develops unmanned ground vehicles andautonomous control software for both military and commercial clients, recently becamethe first company to join a growing movement calling for an international treaty that bans so-called “lethal autonomous weapons.”

Ryan Calo is an assistant law professor at the University of Washington School of Law whose academic work looks at the legal and policy aspects of robotics. Technocrat talked to him about what he anticipates the future of robotics will look like, legal issues he thinks will arise in the coming years, and more.

Read more on Roll Call: Part One, and Part Two

My prediction is that in fewer than 15 years, we will be debating whether human beings should be allowed to drive on highways. After all, we are prone to road rage; rush headlong into traffic jams; break rules; get distracted; and crash into each other. That is why our automobiles need tank-like bumper bars and military-grade crumple zones. And it is why we need speed limits and traffic police. Self-driving cars won’t have our limitations. They will prevent tens of thousands of fatalities every year and better our lifestyles. They will do to human drivers what the horseless carriage did to the horse and buggy.

Tesla’s announcement of an autopilot feature in its next-generation Model S takes us much closer to this future. Yes, there are still technical and logistical hurdles; some academics believe it will take decades for robotic cars to learn to navigate the complexities of the “urban jungle;” and policy makers are undecided about the rules and regulations. But just as Tesla produced an electric vehicle that I liken to a spaceship that travels on land, so too will it keep adding software upgrades until its autopilot doesn’t need a human operator at the steering wheel. I expect this to happen within a decade — despite the obstacles. I have already placed an order for the new model so that I can be part of this evolution.

A drone fell from the sky during a triathlon in western Australia, resulting in an injury to a runner and raising questions about who is legally responsible when an unmanned aerial vehicle comes crashing down on someone.

 

Internet law defined the vanguard of cyberlaw issues in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but Ryan Calo argues that the next wave of legal showdowns will relate to robotics, which have an altogether different set of essential qualities when compared with the Internet. Robotics blurs the line between people and instruments. More so than any other technology in history, robots feel to us like social actors. “Robotics combines, arguably for the first time, the promiscuity of information with the capacity to do real harm,” said Calo at the conference.

Ryan Calo (a law professor at University of Washington, a member of the WeRobot2014 organizing committee and a major intellectual in the law and technology field) has a new paper at this conference, “Robots and the New Cyberlaw.” It lays out better, I think, than any other currently what makes “robots” distinctive in terms of how law, regulation, and ethics need to frame of them. They are different from automation or cyber, for example, and Calo’s paper identifies three features particularly: “embodiment,” physical extension and actions in the world, mobility and motion; “emergence,” by which he means machine learning and self-learning and gradually increasing intelligence capabilities; and “social meaning.”

 

“I think if you find a drone, you set it free. If it comes back to you, it’s meant to be,” said legal drone expert Ryan Calo kiddingly, before more seriously suggesting calling the manufacturer of the drone with its serial number to report it “found” (much like finding a lost credit card).

Is there such a thing as a robot? An excellent paper by Ryan Calo proposes that there is such a thing as a robot, and that, moreover, many of the thorniest, most interesting legal problems on our horizon will involve them.

“Google has a lot of data from its fleet,” says Bryant Walker Smith, resident fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, who’s written about the legality of autonomous cars. “But it’s data that shows you how specially trained, highly educated, early-adopter types mostly in their 20s and 30s can navigate the roads of San Francisco, where it doesn’t snow or flood or all these things, in cars that are much nicer and newer than the average American’s car.”

Listen to the full radio interview at CBS Los Angeles.

““As with cellphones, what private companies do with that data and what government does with that data can be pretty shocking. People are vaguely aware of it, but most people don’t seem to care in terms of modifying their personal behavior,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford University and a lecturer at Stanford Law School.”

““Someday drones will be commonplace in U.S. skies and, before that happens, it’s imperative that Congress enact strong, nationwide privacy rules,” ACLU attorney Catherine Crump said in a statement.”

“Bryant Walker Smith, a Stanford fellow and member of the school’s Center for Automotive Research, has been looking into and blogging on those issues. He thinks self-driving cars are a certainty, but that the features will be rolled out slowly, meaning that humans will still have to be at the wheel for a while.”

“Patrick Lin, director of the Ethics and Emerging Sciences group at California Polytechnic State University speculates the company is working on the first “social” robots, semi-autonomous machines that help people inside their homes or do jobs like law enforcement and public sanitation in the streets.”

While it may seem that drones are set to take over our lives, the reality is a bit more complicated. Drone usage around the world is definitely picking up in the public sector, but when it comes to commercial activity, many countries have strict limitations.

Read more by Daisy Carrington and Jenny Soffel on CNN

There is no question that robotic technology is making life easier, safer, or more convenient for human beings. Despite these benefits, concerns remain about what happens when robotic technology fails, either unintentionally or by design, resulting in economic loss, property damage, injury, or loss of life.

It might seem far-fetched at this stage, but robot ethics and the law is a growing field of study. It’s about their rights, it’s about our ethics and it’s also about liability.

Listen to the full radio interview or read the transcript: Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio National

Bryant Walker Smith, fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, discusses the new legal issues presented by having cars with no drivers.

A town called Deer Trail, located an hour east of Denver, Colo., is considering issuing a novel kind of hunting permit. If passed, the town would give residents licenses to “kill” drones … by shooting them out of the air.

A growing number of states are taking up legislation that addresses self-driving vehicles in an effort to make it easier for researchers to explore the technology.

But most of the legislation deals with how states can facilitate testing — as opposed to consumer use of the vehicles — largely because truly automated vehicles aren’t yet available on the market. When that day comes, states will face a host of thorny questions. Historically, states have regulated drivers, and the feds have regulated vehicles. But what happens when the vehicle is the driver?

 

Drones—the popular term for a wide range of unmanned aerial vehicles that are autonomous, semi-autonomous, or totally remote controlled—are not just limited to military use. Even though drones rightfully call up images of large, ominous, lethal, all-seeing machines, their smaller cousins are breaking into the civilian world of consumer products and business operations. And they’re doing so in a variety of strange ways that may change the face of modern transportation—from how late-night munchies arrive at your doorstep to how equipment and medicine is delivered to remote regions.

 

 

If you don’t listen to Google’s robot car, it will yell at you. I’m not kidding: I learned that on my test-drive at a Stanford conference on vehicle automation a couple weeks ago. The car wanted its human driver to retake the wheel, since this particular model wasn’t designed to merge lanes. If we ignored its command a third time, I wondered, would it pull over and start beating us like an angry dad from the front seat? Better to not find out.

No car is truly autonomous yet, so I didn’t expect Google’s car to drive entirely by itself. But several car companies — such as Audi, BMW, Ford, GM, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Volkswagen, and others — already have models and prototypes today with a surprising degree of driver-assistance automation. We can see “robot” or automated cars (what others have called “autonomous cars”, “driverless cars”, etc.), coming in our rear-view mirror, and they are closer than they appear.

Read n=more: Patrick Lin on Wired.

Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at Stanford Centers for Automotive Research and Internet and Society, looks at developments in driverless car technology.

In California, Nevada, Florida and the District of Columbia, the future of transportation is now: All four jurisdictions are setting ground rules for self-driving cars on the roads.

Google is under pressure from people inside and outside the company to crimp some features until society gets more used to automated cars.

 

By now, seeing one of Google’s experimental, driverless cars zipping down Silicon Valley’s Highway 101, or parking itself on a San Francisco street, is not all that unusual. Indeed, as automakers like Audi, Toyota and Mercedes-Benz make plans for self-driving vehicles, it is only a matter of time before such cars become a big part of the great American traffic jam.

While driverless cars might still seem like science fiction outside the Valley, the people working and thinking about these technologies are starting to ask what these autos could mean for the city of the future. The short answer is “a lot.”

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday came out with a road map for navigating the future of self-driving cars. Bryant Walker Smith, a lecturer at Stanford Law School who studies driverless vehicles,  said there’s still no consensus on how we’ll know these cars are safe enough.  Should it be as safe as the average driver or better? “NHTSA’s research will, I hope, help address these questions,” he said.

Read more: The Wall Street Journal

From Roombas to drones, scientists are developing machines to be more and more self-sufficient. But even if they’re programmed to do good—what happens when something goes wrong? If a robot ‘accidentally’ kills someone, who’s to blame? Josh Zepps interviews the following guests:

Boston Police Chief Edward F. Davis said he wants to use drones at next year’s Boston Marathon, calling them “a good idea.” Using a drone to pursue fleeing suspects like the Tsarnaev brothers would be legal under state and federal law. But pre-emptively hovering drones over an event still makes many uncomfortable.

In the June issue of Reason, one of my favorite publications, Greg Beato has an article discussing the public policy implications of autonomous vehicles, such as Google’s Self-Driving Car. While I appreciate libertarians (being one myself) taking this technology seriously, Beato makes a number of questionable assumptions and outright factual errors in the piece. Here’s my quick attempt to address some of them.

 

Read more: Openmarket.org

 

Contrary to popular opinion, ethics is more than “gut reactions” or intuitions, but it’s about drawing out and applying broader principles that ought to guide our actions, such as maximizing happiness, respecting autonomy, doing no harm, or treating others as you’d want to be treated. Policy, in contrast, often takes a more pragmatic or realist approach, giving much weight to broader effects with an eye toward achieving certain goals; and so policy could diverge from ethics. And law is about complying with rules established and enforced by governments, under penalty of punishment. (As incomplete as these definitions are, they should be enough for our purposes here.)

 

In the following scenarios of future warfare, circa year 2025, I will tease out tensions among the three areas.

By Patrick Lin. Cross-posted from The Atlantic.

In an influential 2011 article, “The Drone as Privacy Catalyst,” law professor Ryan Calo predicted that the dystopian images that drones evoke could spur much-needed reforms to American privacy law. That’s certainly happening on the home front. CNET’s Declan McCullagh reports that a bipartisan “anti-drone revolt” has prompted the introduction of new federal and state legislation …