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Articles 1 - 30 of 49
Full-Text Articles in Law
Automatic Reaction - What Happens To Workers At Firms That Automate?, James Bessen, Maarten Goos, Anna Salomons, Wiljan Van Den Berge
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
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 …
The Remainder Effect: How Automation Complements Labor Quality, James Bessen, Erich Denk, Chen Meng
The Remainder Effect: How Automation Complements Labor Quality, James Bessen, Erich Denk, Chen Meng
Faculty Scholarship
This paper argues that automation both complements and replaces workers. Extending the Acemoglu-Restrepo model of automation to consider labor quality, we obtain a Remainder Effect: while automation displaces labor on some tasks, it raises the returns to skill on remaining tasks across skill groups. This effect increases between-firm pay inequality while labor displacement affects within-firm inequality. Using job ad data, we find firm adoption of information technologies leads to both greater demand for diverse skills and higher pay across skill groups. This accounts for most of the sorting of skills to high paying firms that is central to rising inequality.
Chapter 8: Information Technology And The New Capitalism, James Bessen
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 …
The Automated Administrative State: A Crisis Of Legitimacy, Ryan Calo, Danielle Keats Citron
The Automated Administrative State: A Crisis Of Legitimacy, Ryan Calo, Danielle Keats Citron
Articles
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 …
An Education Theory Of Fault For Autonomous Systems, William D. Smart, Cindy M. Grimm, Woodrow Hartzog
An Education Theory Of Fault For Autonomous Systems, William D. Smart, Cindy M. Grimm, Woodrow Hartzog
Faculty Scholarship
Automated systems like self-driving cars and “smart” thermostats are a challenge for fault-based legal regimes like negligence because they have the potential to behave in unpredictable ways. How can people who build and deploy complex automated systems be said to be at fault when they could not have reasonably anticipated the behavior (and thus risk) of their tools?
Part of the problem is that the legal system has yet to settle on the language for identifying culpable behavior in the design and deployment for automated systems. In this article we offer an education theory of fault for autonomous systems—a new …
Administrative Law In The Automated State, Cary Coglianese
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 …
Beyond Algorithms: Toward A Normative Theory Of Automated Regulation, Felix Mormann
Beyond Algorithms: Toward A Normative Theory Of Automated Regulation, Felix Mormann
Faculty Scholarship
The proliferation of artificial intelligence in our daily lives has spawned a burgeoning literature on the dawn of dehumanized, algorithmic governance. Remarkably, the scholarly discourse overwhelmingly fails to acknowledge that automated, non-human governance has long been a reality. For more than a century, policymakers have relied on regulations that automatically adjust to changing circumstances, without the need for human intervention. This article surveys the track record of self-adjusting governance mechanisms to propose a normative theory of automated regulation.
Effective policymaking frequently requires anticipation of future developments, from technology innovation to geopolitical change. Self-adjusting regulation offers an insurance policy against the …
The Paradox Of Automation As Anti-Bias Intervention, Ifeoma Ajunwa
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 …
When They Hear Us: Race, Algorithms And The Practice Of Criminal Law, Ngozi Okidegbe
When They Hear Us: Race, Algorithms And The Practice Of Criminal Law, Ngozi Okidegbe
Faculty Scholarship
We are in the midst of a fraught debate in criminal justice reform circles about the merits of using algorithms. Proponents claim that these algorithms offer an objective path towards substantially lowering high rates of incarceration and racial and socioeconomic disparities without endangering community safety. On the other hand, racial justice scholars argue that these algorithms threaten to entrench racial inequity within the system because they utilize risk factors that correlate with historic racial inequities, and in so doing, reproduce the same racial status quo, but under the guise of scientific objectivity.
This symposium keynote address discusses the challenge that …
Gdpr And The Importance Of Data To Ai Startups, James Bessen, Stephen Michael Impink, Lydia Reichensperger, Robert Seamans
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
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 …
Access To Algorithms, Hannah Bloch-Wehba
Access To Algorithms, Hannah Bloch-Wehba
Faculty Scholarship
Federal, state, and local governments increasingly depend on automated systems — often procured from the private sector — to make key decisions about civil rights and civil liberties. When individuals affected by these decisions seek access to information about the algorithmic methodologies that produced them, governments frequently assert that this information is proprietary and cannot be disclosed.
Recognizing that opaque algorithmic governance poses a threat to civil rights and liberties, scholars have called for a renewed focus on transparency and accountability for automated decision making. But scholars have neglected a critical avenue for promoting public accountability and transparency for automated …
Automation And Workers: Re-Imagining The Income Tax For The Digital Age, Jinyan Li, Arjin Choi, Cameron Smith
Automation And Workers: Re-Imagining The Income Tax For The Digital Age, Jinyan Li, Arjin Choi, Cameron Smith
Articles & Book Chapters
In the age of automation, more and more workers lose jobs or become gig workers, and the share of labour income in national income is expected to decline further. These developments threaten the sustainability of Canada’s 102-year-old income tax as a major source of government revenue and a key instrument for redistributing social income. The authors make the case for re-imagining the income tax to suit the digital age. They propose that all workers should be taxed the same, regardless of the private-law arrangements or technical means used to carry out the work. They call for a reconceptualization of the …
The Automated Administrative State: A Crisis Of Legitimacy, Danielle K. Citron, Ryan Calo
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 …
New Technologies And Old Treaties, Bryant Walker Smith
New Technologies And Old Treaties, Bryant Walker Smith
Faculty Publications
Every road vehicle must have a driver able to control it while in motion. These requirements, explicit in two important conventions on road traffic, have an uncertain relationship to the automated motor vehicles that are currently under development—often colloquially called “self-driving” or “driverless.” The immediate legal and policy questions are straightforward: Are these requirements consistent with automated driving and, if not, how should the inconsistency be resolved? More subtle questions go directly to international law’s role in a world that artificial intelligence is helping to rapidly change: In a showdown between a promising new technology and an entrenched treaty regime, …
It's Not The Robot's Fault! Russian And American Perspectives On Responsibility For Robot Harms, Bryant Walker Smith, Andrey Neznamov
It's Not The Robot's Fault! Russian And American Perspectives On Responsibility For Robot Harms, Bryant Walker Smith, Andrey Neznamov
Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Automation And Jobs: When Technology Boosts Employment, James Bessen
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
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
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
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
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 …
Professional Judgment In An Era Of Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning, Frank A. Pasquale
Professional Judgment In An Era Of Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning, Frank A. Pasquale
Faculty Scholarship
Though artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare and education now accomplishes diverse tasks, there are two features that tend to unite the information processing behind efforts to substitute it for professionals in these fields: reductionism and functionalism. True believers in substitutive automation tend to model work in human services by reducing the professional role to a set of behaviors initiated by some stimulus, which are intended to accomplish some predetermined goal, or maximize some measure of well-being. However, true professional judgment hinges on a way of knowing the world that is at odds with the epistemology of substitutive automation. Instead of …
Automation And Predictive Analytics In Patent Prosecution: Uspto Implications And Policy, Tabrez Y. Ebrahim
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 …
Using Ai To Analyze Patent Claim Indefiniteness, Dean Alderucci, Kevin D. Ashley
Using Ai To Analyze Patent Claim Indefiniteness, Dean Alderucci, Kevin D. Ashley
Articles
In this Article, we describe how to use artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to partially automate a type of legal analysis, determining whether a patent claim satisfies the definiteness requirement. Although fully automating such a high-level cognitive task is well beyond state-of-the-art AI, we show that AI can nevertheless assist the decision maker in making this determination. Specifically, the use of custom AI technology can aid the decision maker by (1) mining patent text to rapidly bring relevant information to the decision maker attention, and (2) suggesting simple inferences that can be drawn from that information.
We begin by summarizing the …
The Business Of Ai Startups, James Bessen, Stephen Michael Impink, Robert Seamans, Lydia Reichensperger
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 …
What Should We Do After Work? Automation And Employment Law, Cynthia L. Estlund
What Should We Do After Work? Automation And Employment Law, Cynthia L. Estlund
AI-DR Collection
Will advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning put vast swaths of the labor force out of work or into fierce competition for the jobs that remain? Or, as in the past, will new jobs absorb workers displaced by automation? These hotly debated questions have profound implications for the fortress of rights and benefits that the law of work has constructed on the foundation of the employment relationship. This Article charts a path for reforming the law of work in the face of both justified anxiety and uncertainty about the future impact of automation on jobs.
Automation is driven …
Work Only We Can Do: Professional Responsibility In An Age Of Automation, Sherman J. Clark
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 …
The Regulation Of Trading Markets: A Survey And Evaluation, Paul G. Mahoney, Gabriel V. Rauterberg
The Regulation Of Trading Markets: A Survey And Evaluation, Paul G. Mahoney, Gabriel V. Rauterberg
Book Chapters
This chapter was prepared for a conference exploring the desirability and structure of a new special study of the securities markets. Our objective is not to resolve all of the questions that commentators have raised about the new equity markets, but to lay the groundwork for a new special study by surveying the state of market regulation, identifying issues, and offering preliminary evaluations.
Ai And Jobs: The Role Of Demand, James Bessen
Ai And Jobs: The Role Of Demand, James Bessen
Faculty Scholarship
In manufacturing, technology has sharply reduced jobs in recent decades. But before that, for over a century, employment grew, even in industries experiencing rapid technological change. What changed? Demand was highly elastic at first and then became inelastic. The effect of artificial intelligence (AI) on jobs will similarly depend critically on the nature of demand. This paper presents a simple model of demand that accurately predicts the rise and fall of employment in the textile, steel, and automotive industries. This model provides a useful framework for exploring how AI is likely to affect jobs over the next 10 or 20 …