Law Commons^™

Humans In The Loop, Rebecca Crootof, Margot E. Kaminski, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Publications

From lethal drones to cancer diagnostics, humans are increasingly working with complex and artificially intelligent algorithms to make decisions which affect human lives, raising questions about how best to regulate these "human-in-the-loop" systems. We make four contributions to the discourse.

First, contrary to the popular narrative, law is already profoundly and often problematically involved in governing human-in-the-loop systems: it regularly affects whether humans are retained in or removed from the loop. Second, we identify "the MABA-MABA trap," which occurs when policymakers attempt to address concerns about algorithmic incapacities by inserting a human into a decision-making process. Regardless of whether the …