Stephanie Ballard
Jennifer Rhee will lead a discussion of Stephanie Ballard and Ryan Calo‘s Taking Futures Seriously: Forecasting as Method in Robotics Law and Policy on Saturday, April 13, at 9:30 a.m. at #werobot 2019.
A central challenge in setting law and policy around emerging technology is predicting how technology will evolve. In failing to consider the future of technology, we are often left with laws and policies that fall short of our technological reality. The 99th United States Congress had no experience with the commercial internet, leaving it ill-equipped to envision the future of communications technology or to understand how widespread access to citizen information would need to be regulated. Indeed the laws Congress passed in 1986, which still govern electronic communications to this day, made assumptions about the nature of remote computing that have not obtained for decades.
Ryan Calo
Jennifer Rhee
The thesis of this paper, co-authored by an information scientist and a legal scholar, is that robotics law and policy as a field would benefit from exposure to rigorous methods of forecasting. The first section introduces the reader to the field of future studies through an efficient review of the extensive literature. The second section isolates three specific methods—scenario planning, future wheels, and design fiction—and applies them to the case study of robotic delivery.
We selected robotic delivery as a case study because of its many potential configurations (e.g., drone or land-based robots) and its still-unfolding legal context. In the final section, we consider the role that futures methods could and should play in the drafting of contemporary tech policy. We are mindful, of course, that making predictions is difficult and fraught. Literal “future-proofing” is a fool’s errand. Nevertheless, a systematic approach to the exercise of envisioning has the potential to significantly improve policymaking across robotics and other domains.
