Law Commons^™

Automatic Reaction - What Happens To Workers At Firms That Automate?, James Bessen, Maarten Goos, Anna Salomons, Wiljan Van Den Berge

Faculty Scholarship

We provide the first estimate of the impacts of automation on individual workers by combining Dutch micro-data with a direct measure of automation expenditures covering firms in all private non-financial industries over 2000-2016. Using an event study differences-indifferences design, we find that automation at the firm increases the probability of workers separating from their employers and decreases days worked, leading to a 5-year cumulative wage income loss of about 8% of one year’s earnings for incumbent workers. We find little change in wage rates. Further, lost wage earnings are only partially offset by various benefits systems and are disproportionately borne …

Content Moderation As Surveillance, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

Technology platforms are the new governments, and content moderation is the new law, or so goes a common refrain. As platforms increasingly turn toward new, automated mechanisms of enforcing their rules, the apparent power of the private sector seems only to grow. Yet beneath the surface lies a web of complex relationships between public and private authorities that call into question whether platforms truly possess such unilateral power. Law enforcement and police are exerting influence over platform content rules, giving governments a louder voice in supposedly “private” decisions. At the same time, law enforcement avails itself of the affordances of …

Chapter 8: Information Technology And The New Capitalism, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

Harnessing Digitalization for Sustainable Economic Development: Insights for Asia describes digitalization’s role in raising the productive capacities of economies. It examines how digital transformation can enhance trade, financial inclusion, and firm competitiveness, as well as how greater digital infrastructure investment, internet connectivity, and financial and digital education in the region can maximize digitalization’s economic benefits. It also explains the importance of striking the right balance between the regulation and supervision of financial technology to enable innovation and safeguarding financial stability and consumer protection.

Part I of the book seeks to build an understanding of digitalization’s effects on macroeconomic performance, including …

Administrative Law In The Automated State, Cary Coglianese

All Faculty Scholarship

In the future, administrative agencies will rely increasingly on digital automation powered by machine learning algorithms. Can U.S. administrative law accommodate such a future? Not only might a highly automated state readily meet longstanding administrative law principles, but the responsible use of machine learning algorithms might perform even better than the status quo in terms of fulfilling administrative law’s core values of expert decision-making and democratic accountability. Algorithmic governance clearly promises more accurate, data-driven decisions. Moreover, due to their mathematical properties, algorithms might well prove to be more faithful agents of democratic institutions. Yet even if an automated state were …

The Paradox Of Automation As Anti-Bias Intervention, Ifeoma Ajunwa

AI-DR Collection

A received wisdom is that automated decision-making serves as an anti-bias intervention. The conceit is that removing humans from the decision-making process will also eliminate human bias. The paradox, however, is that in some instances, automated decision-making has served to replicate and amplify bias. With a case study of the algorithmic capture of hiring as heuristic device, this Article provides a taxonomy of problematic features associated with algorithmic decision-making as anti-bias intervention and argues that those features are at odds with the fundamental principle of equal opportunity in employment. To examine these problematic features within the context of algorithmic hiring …

Gdpr And The Importance Of Data To Ai Startups, James Bessen, Stephen Michael Impink, Lydia Reichensperger, Robert Seamans

Faculty Scholarship

What is the impact of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regime (“GDPR”) and data regulation on AI startups? How important is data to AI product development? We study these questions using unique survey data of commercial AI startups. AI startups rely on data for their product development. Given the scale and scope of their business models, these startups are particularly susceptible to policy changes impacting data collection, storage and use. We find that training data and frequent model refreshes are particularly important for AI startups that rely on neural nets and ensemble learning algorithms. We also find that firms …

Automation In Moderation, Hannah Bloch-Wehba

Faculty Scholarship

This Article assesses recent efforts to encourage online platforms to use automated means to prevent the dissemination of unlawful online content before it is ever seen or distributed. As lawmakers in Europe and around the world closely scrutinize platforms’ “content moderation” practices, automation and artificial intelligence appear increasingly attractive options for ridding the Internet of many kinds of harmful online content, including defamation, copyright infringement, and terrorist speech. Proponents of these initiatives suggest that requiring platforms to screen user content using automation will promote healthier online discourse and will aid efforts to limit Big Tech’s power.

In fact, however, the …

The Automated Administrative State: A Crisis Of Legitimacy, Danielle K. Citron, Ryan Calo

Faculty Scholarship

The legitimacy of the administrative state is premised on our faith in agency expertise. Despite their extra-constitutional structure, administrative agencies have been on firm footing for a long time in reverence to their critical role in governing a complex, evolving society. They are delegated enormous power because they respond expertly and nimbly to evolving conditions.

In recent decades, state and federal agencies have embraced a novel mode of operation: automation. Agencies rely more and more on software and algorithms in carrying out their delegated responsibilities. The automated administrative state, however, is demonstrably riddled with concerns. Legal challenges regarding the denial …

Automation And Jobs: When Technology Boosts Employment, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

Will new technologies cause industries to shed jobs, requiring novel policies to address mass unemployment? Sometimes productivity-enhancing technology increases industry employment instead. In manufacturing, jobs grew along with productivity for a century or more; only later did productivity gains bring declining employment. What changed? The elasticity of demand. Using data over two centuries for US textile, steel and auto industries, this paper shows that automation initially spurred job growth because demand was highly elastic. But demand later became satiated, leading to job losses. A simple model explains why this pattern might be common, suggesting that today's technologies may cause some …

Future Work, Jeffrey M. Hirsch

AI-DR Collection

The Industrial Revolution. The Digital Age. These revolutions radically altered the workplace and society. We may be on the cusp of a new era—one that will rival or even surpass these historic disruptions. Technology such as artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, and cutting-edge monitoring devices are developing at a rapid pace. These technologies have already begun to infiltrate the workplace and will continue to do so at ever increasing speed and breadth.

This Article addresses the impact of these emerging technologies on the workplace of the present and the future. Drawing upon interviews with leading technologists, the Article explains the …

Digital Market Perfection, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

Google’s, Apple’s, and other companies’ automated assistants are increasingly serving as personal shoppers. These digital intermediaries will save us time by purchasing grocery items, transferring bank accounts, and subscribing to cable. The literature has only begun to hint at the paradigm shift needed to navigate the legal risks and rewards of this coming era of automated commerce. This Article begins to fill that gap first by surveying legal battles related to contract exit, data access, and deception that will determine the extent to which automated assistants are able to help consumers to search and switch, potentially bringing tremendous societal benefits. …

Rise Of The Robot Lawyers?, Milan Markovic

Faculty Scholarship

The advent of artificial intelligence has provoked considerable speculation about the future of the American workforce, including highly educated professionals such as lawyers and doctors. Although most commentators are alarmed by the prospect of intelligent machines displacing millions of workers, this is not so with respect to the legal sector. Media accounts and some legal scholars envision a future where intelligent machines perform the bulk of legal work, and legal services are less expensive and more accessible. This future is purportedly at hand as lawyers struggle to compete with technologically savvy alternative legal service providers.

This Article challenges the notion …

Privacy And Legal Automation: The Dmca As A Case Study, Jonathon Penney

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, computing capacity, and big data analytics are creating exciting new possibilities for legal automation. At the same time, these changes pose serious risks for civil liberties and other societal interests. Yet, existing scholarship is narrow, leaving uncertainty on a range of issues, including a glaring lack of systematic empirical work as to how legal automation may impact people’s privacy and freedom. This article addresses this gap with an original empirical analysis of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which today sits at the forefront of algorithmic law due to its automated enforcement of copyright …

Automation And Predictive Analytics In Patent Prosecution: Uspto Implications And Policy, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial-intelligence technological advancements bring automation and predictive analytics into patent prosecution. The information asymmetry between inventors and patent examiners is expanded by artificial intelligence, which transforms the inventor-examiner interaction to machine-human interactions. In response to automated patent drafting, automated office-action responses, "cloems" (computer-generated word permutations) for defensive patenting, and machine-learning guidance (based on constantly updated patent-prosecution big data), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) should reevaluate patent-examination policy from economic, fairness, time, and transparency perspectives. By conceptualizing the inventor-examiner relationship as a "patenting market," economic principles suggest stronger efficiencies if both inventors and the USPTO have better information …

The Business Of Ai Startups, James Bessen, Stephen Michael Impink, Robert Seamans, Lydia Reichensperger

Faculty Scholarship

New machine learning techniques have led to an acceleration of “artificial intelligence” (AI). Numerous papers have projected substantial job losses based on assessments of technical feasibility. But what is the actual impact? This paper reports on a survey of commercial AI startups, documenting rich detail about their businesses and their impacts on their customers. These firms report benefits of AI that are more often about enhancing human capabilities than replacing them. Their applications more often increase professional, managerial, and marketing jobs and decrease manual, clerical, and frontline service jobs. These startups sell to firms of different sizes, in different industries …

Work Only We Can Do: Professional Responsibility In An Age Of Automation, Sherman J. Clark

Articles

Automation can help us do our work as lawyers; but in the process, it should also force us to be more thoughtful about what our work really is or ought to be.' The challenge for the profession, as I see it, is not simply to survive the advent of new technology, nor even merely to make effective use of new tools. While addressing those immediate concerns, we should also welcome the concomitant opportunity to develop and refine our understanding of what it means to be a good and ethical lawyer. As technological developments free us from and prevent us from …

Regulating By Robot: Administrative Decision Making In The Machine-Learning Era, Cary Coglianese, David Lehr

All Faculty Scholarship

Machine-learning algorithms are transforming large segments of the economy, underlying everything from product marketing by online retailers to personalized search engines, and from advanced medical imaging to the software in self-driving cars. As machine learning’s use has expanded across all facets of society, anxiety has emerged about the intrusion of algorithmic machines into facets of life previously dependent on human judgment. Alarm bells sounding over the diffusion of artificial intelligence throughout the private sector only portend greater anxiety about digital robots replacing humans in the governmental sphere. A few administrative agencies have already begun to adopt this technology, while others …

Et Tu, Android?: Regulating Dangerous And Dishonest Robots, Woodrow Hartzog

Faculty Scholarship

Consumer robots like personal digital assistants, automated cars, robot companions, chore-bots, and personal drones raise common consumer protection issues, such as fraud, privacy, data security, and risks to health, physical safety, and finances. They also raise new consumer protection issues, or at least call into question how existing consumer protection regimes might be applied to such emerging technologies. Yet it is unclear which legal regimes should govern these robots and what consumer protection rules for robots should look like.

This paper argues that the FTC's grant of authority and existing jurisprudence are well-suited for protecting consumers who buy and interact …

How Computer Automation Affects Occupations: Technology, Jobs, And Skills, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

This paper investigates basic relationships between technology and occupations. Building a general occupational model, I look at detailed occupations since 1980 to explore whether computers are related to job losses or other sources of wage inequality. Occupations that use computers grow faster, not slower. This is true even for highly routine and mid-wage occupations. Estimates reject computers as a source of significant net technological unemployment or job polarization. But computerized occupations substitute for other occupations, shifting employment and requiring new skills. Because new skills are costly to learn, computer use is associated with substantially greater within-occupation wage inequality.

Technological Opacity, Predictability, And Self-Driving Cars, Harry Surden, Mary-Anne Williams

Publications

Autonomous or “self-driving” cars are vehicles that drive themselves without human supervision or input. Because of safety benefits that they are expected to bring, autonomous vehicles are likely to become more common. Notably, for the first time, people will share a physical environment with computer-controlled machines that can both direct their own activities and that have considerable range of movement. This represents a distinct change from our current context. Today people share physical spaces either with machines that have free range of movement, but are controlled by people (e.g. automobiles) or with machines that are controlled by computers, but highly …

Adapting The Law Of Armed Conflict To Autonomous Weapon Systems, Kenneth Anderson, Daniel Reisner, Matthew Waxman

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

As increasingly automated – and in some cases fully autonomous – weapon systems enter the battlefield or become possible, it is important that international norms to regulate them head down a path that is coherent and practical. Contrary to the claims of some advocates, autonomous weapon systems are not inherently illegal or unethical. The technologies involved potentially hold promise for making armed conflict more discriminating and causing less harm on the battlefield. They do pose important challenges, however, with regard to law of armed conflict rules regulating the use of weapons. Those challenges demand international attention and special processes for …

Autonomous Vehicle Liability—Application Of Common Carrier Liability, Dylan Levalley

Seattle University Law Review SUpra

No abstract provided.

Law And Ethics For Autonomous Weapon Systems: Why A Ban Won't Work And How The Laws Of War Can, Kenneth Anderson, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

Public debate is heating up over the future development of autonomous weapon systems. Some concerned critics portray that future, often invoking science-fiction imagery, as a plain choice between a world in which those systems are banned outright and a world of legal void and ethical collapse on the battlefield. Yet an outright ban on autonomous weapon systems, even if it could be made effective, trades whatever risks autonomous weapon systems might pose in war for the real, if less visible, risk of failing to develop forms of automation that might make the use of force more precise and less harmful …

Law And Ethics For Robot Soldiers, Kenneth Anderson, Matthew C. Waxman

Faculty Scholarship

Lethal autonomous machines will inevitably enter the future battlefield – but they will do so incrementally, one small step at a time. The combination of inevitable and incremental development raises not only complex strategic and operational questions but also profound legal and ethical ones. The inevitability of these technologies comes from both supply-side and demand-side factors. Advances in sensor and computational technologies will supply “smarter” machines that can be programmed to kill or destroy, while the increasing tempo of military operations and political pressures to protect one’s own personnel and civilian persons and property will demand continuing research, development, and …

The Variable Determinacy Thesis, Harry Surden

Publications

This Article proposes a novel technique for characterizing the relative determinacy of legal decision-making. I begin with the observation that the determinacy of legal outcomes varies from context to context within the law. To augment this intuition, I develop a theoretical model of determinate legal decision-making. This model aims to capture the essential features that are typically associated with the concept of legal determinacy. I then argue that we can use such an idealized model as a standard for expressing the relative determinacy or indeterminacy of decision-making in actual, observed legal contexts. From a legal theory standpoint, this approach - …

Automatic Generation Of A Legal Expert System, Layman E. Allen, Charles S. Saxon

Book Chapters

The use of the AUTOPROLOG system to generate automatically a legal expert system is described in this chapter. The interpretation of a statutory or other legal rule by one expert (or by the consensus of a group of experts) expressed in a normalized form is the only input needed by the AUTOPROLOG system (which includes Turbo Prolog, the AUTOPRO program, and some data files) to produce automatically a computer program that is an expert system for that legal rule. The process for producing a legal expert system for Section 213.1 of the Modal Penal Code, which deals with rape and …

Exploring Computer Aided Generation Of Questions For Normalizing Legal Rules, Layman E. Allen, Charles S. Saxon

Book Chapters

The process of normalizing a legal rule requires a drafter to indicate where the intent is to be precise and where it is to be imprecise in expressing both the between-sentence and within-sentence logical structure of that rule. Three different versions of a legal rule are constructed in the process of normalizing it: (1) the logical structure of the present version, (2) the detailed marker version, and (3) the logical structure of the normalized version. In order to construct the third version the analyst must formulate and answer specific questions about the terms that are used to express the logical …