By Monika Gonzalez Mesa, From Daily Business Review

The robots are coming.

And they are swiftly producing a host of legal and ethical issues that will intensify as robotic advancements become increasingly autonomous and ubiquitous.

“We will see changes in areas of the law that we can’t even imagine as a result of robotics and artificial intelligence,” said Stephen Wu, an information technology attorney who specializes in robots and AI at Silicon Valley Law Group in San Jose, California.

Technology has already affected nearly every area of law. Trademark attorneys have battled for domain names. Estate lawyers check for virtual assets. Family lawyers regularly introduce evidence from social media in divorce proceedings, exposing a Facebook dark side. Social media is also increasingly an issue in labor law.

Likewise, advances in robotics will increasingly affect medical malpractice, motor vehicle and aviation law. Drones and driverless cars using electronic eyes to navigate will likely capture footage that creates privacy and information ownership issues, not to mention liability and compliance concerns.

This holiday season, vendors expect to sell about 700,000 recreational drones or “unmanned aircraft systems.” The Federal Aviation Administration has authorized more than 2,400 commercial drones, so deliveries may not be too far away.

“The two main areas of work that might pick up are personal injury … and regulatory compliance for drones,” said Jonathan Rupprecht, an attorney at Rupprecht Law in Palm Beach Gardens, a pilot, flight instructor and drone owner who has written two books on drone law.

The potential for people in the air or on the ground to be struck by a moving drone is inescapable.

Some rugged drones are used for games of airborne bumper cars to knock each other out of the sky. Others are can race at more than 60 mph, Rupprecht said.

“They race them in the forest like ‘Star Wars: Return of the Jedi,’ ” Rupprecht said, noting a national drone race scheduled next year in Hawaii has a $100,000 prize.

Drone Registration

Drones vary in size and composition but have metal parts and batteries that could cause more damage to a jet engine than an unlucky bird. They are supposed to stay five miles away from airports and below 400 feet, but the rules are often ignored. The FAA reports 138 pilots reported seeing drones at altitudes of up to 10,000 feet in June and another 137 in July.

“Someone with nefarious intent or someone with bad intentions to American interests could do a lot of harm with a drone,” said Matthew Henshon, a partner at Henshon Klein in Boston and co-chairman of the American Bar Association committee on artificial intelligence and robotics. “There are a lot of things that are potentially going to go wrong here, so it’s a big safety issue.”

The FAA may require recreational drone users to register their aircraft for safety reasons. But if a drone flies off after an infraction, there is no way to track who it belongs to. Legislation may be introduced to require manufacturers to install technology to prevent them from flying over sensitive airspace, above 500 feet and near airports.

“People are fearful that one of these things is going to kill somebody. That is going to happen,” Rupprecht said. “But they can also save lives.”

A drone, for instance, can take an aerial picture without any risks to a helicopter pilot and photographer. A driverless car could get someone to the hospital in an emergency.

But because the cars would be more autonomous than drones, they would pose more ethical questions, and legislation would be likely.

If a driverless car is hit from behind and the computer must decide whether to hit a man waiting at a bus stop or a family in a car, what should the car be programmed to do? Should it be programmed to make a random decision? Who will make those programming decisions? Will it be a programmer, the company’s legal counsel, the Department of Motor Vehicles or a driver with a dialog box of preferences?

“The choices may not be just a person on the right or a person on the left. There may be a telephone pole in the middle, which may not hurt anybody else, but it really hurts the driver,” said Michael Froomkin, a professor at the University of Miami School of Law specializing in technology law, the Internet and robots. “If it doesn’t prioritize the driver, some people are going to be afraid to be in the car.”

Robot Law

To help the legal community prepare for this brave new world, Froomkin initiated We Robot, an annual national conference on law and policy relating to robotics. Scheduled for April 1-2 at UM law school, the program seeks to foster communication among lawyers, engineers, ethicists, robot builders and regulators.

“It’s easier to talk about these things in the abstract now before they’ve happened, before you have people who are invested in their particular tragedy,” he said.

In the engineering of technology, Froomkin said a lot of day-to-day practical choices are made by people who do not stop to consider the long-term issues their decisions will create. For example, a website domain registration system doesn’t consider potential trademark problems. Similarly, web designers initially thought very little about security.

“If we could get some lawyers in the room so they would get some help in making these decisions, we would save a lot of people a great deal of trouble later,” he said.

But sales of driverless cars may be five to eight years away, Henshon noted.

“We have time with cars,” he said. “We aren’t going to sell 700,000 driverless cars this Christmas. Drones are an immediate problem.”

IMAGE: Michael Froomkin, Laurie Silvers & Mitchell Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Miami School of Law.

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