Rebecca Crootof is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Richmond School of Law. Dr. Crootof's primary areas of research include technology law, international law, and torts; her written work explores questions stemming from the iterative relationship between law and technology, often in light of social changes sparked by increasingly autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, cyberspace, robotics, and the Internet of Things. Work available at www.crootof.com.
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There is currently no international legal regime that compensates civilians whose property, bodies, or lives are destroyed in armed conflicts. Russia’s war in Ukraine might provide the needed political impetus to create a permanent “war torts” institution.
After nearly a year of suspense and controversy, any day now the team of artificial intelligence (AI) researchers at OpenAI will release the full and final version of GPT-2, a language model that can “generate coherent paragraphs and perform rudimentary reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarization—all without task-specific training.” When OpenAI first unveiled the program in February, it was capable of impressive feats: Given a two-sentence prompt about unicorns living in the Andes Mountains, for example, the program
Those working to ban “killer robots” were clearly distraught when the Chair of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) recently announced that the August 2017 meeting—and, by extension, the inaugural meeting of the Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems—was canceled due to insufficient funding. Disappointed but undeterred, ban advocates proposed that states “move swiftly . .
Nearly half a year after the DNC hack, the United States finally took action. Citing the role of the Russian government in cyber operations apparently intended to affect the U.S. presidential election, as well as harassment of U.S.
Human Rights Watch and the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School have released their latest report regarding autonomous weapon systems: Precedent for Preemption: The Ban on Blinding Lasers as a Model for a Killer Robots Prohibition. While new regulation is needed, the report fails to address crucial distinctions between the successful ban on permanently blinding lasers and the proposed prohibition on autonomous weapon systems.