At my office we put tennis balls on the legs of the chairs to reduce the noise of the scraping chairs against the parquet floors. They are hard to miss, but they fulfill their purpose. For this reason, I never reflected on what kind of feelings these bright fluorescent yellow balls might evoke when visitors see them attached to the bottom of the meeting room’s chair legs. (read more...)
Editor’s Note: This is the seventh and final post in our Law in Computation series. At first, I was perplexed by the K5 by Knightscope, a “fully autonomous security data machine,” rolling through the Irvine Spectrum Shopping Center last summer. Now, I am not cavalier, nor naive, about my rights to privacy, confidentiality, and anonymity, but I fully accept that I will be captured by surveillance cameras from my arrival to departure in many private places. After all, there is a strong market demand for surveillance technologies, and the market has long existed with little regulations from statutory or case law; their use continues to expand as the cost of sensors and data processing decreases. (read more...)
Editor’s Note: This is the sixth post in our Law in Computation series. Back in the mid-1990s when I was a graduate student, I “interned” at a parole office as part of my methods training in field research. In my first week, another intern—an undergraduate administration of justice student from a local college—trained me in how to complete pre-release reports for those men and women coming out of prison and entering onto parole supervision. The pre-release report was largely centered on a numeric evaluation of the future parolee’s risks and needs. The instrument used by the parole office was relatively crude, but it exemplified a trend in criminal justice that pits numbers-based tools, designed to predict and categorize system-involved subjects, against more intuitive judgments of legal actors in the system. (read more...)
Editor’s Note: This is the fifth post in our Law in Computation series. In February 2018, journalist Kashmir Hill wrote about her collaboration with researcher Surya Mattu to make her (Hill’s) home as “smart” as possible. They wanted to see what they could learn about privacy, both from the perspective of living in such a house and from the ‘data fumes’ or ‘data exhaust’ of all these smart appliances themselves. Data fumes or exhaust refer to the traces we leave behind when we interact digitally but also, often, information that we provide to sign-up on digital platforms (gender, location, relationships etc). These traces, when aligned and collated with our daily digital behaviours on social media, e-commerce and Search platforms, are vital to the speculative and dynamic constructions of who we might be. (read more...)
Editor’s Note: This post was written by Donna Davis, PhD – University of Oregon and is the sixth post in the series on Disabling Technologies Imagine sitting on the beach on a beautiful day. The sun is rising and the birds singing. Wisps of clouds gently float by as the surf rhythmically rolls in and out at your feet and the children frolic in the sand. You can almost feel the heat of the sun, only you can’t — because you’re sitting in a virtual world. Such is the experience of the childless agoraphobe who may never see the ocean again. Virtual worlds have always been places of both escape and entertainment. For people with disabilities, this notion of escape comes with far greater opportunity but also risk. The risk is that this escape is tied to a simplistic understanding of both virtual reality and disability – especially where people who have never experienced either assume an individual with disabilities may want to abandon their physical experience for the comfort of a virtual one. (read more...)
Editor’s Note: This is the fourth post in our Law in Computation series. War is an experiment in catastrophe; yet, policymakers today believe chance can be tamed and ‘ethical war’ waged by simply increasing battlefield technology, systematically removing human error/bias. How does an increasingly artificially intelligent battlefield reshape our capacity to think ethically in warfare (Schwartz, 2016)? Traditional ethics of war bases the justness of how one fights in war on the two principles of jus in bello (justice in fighting war) ethics: discrimination and proportionality, weighted against military necessity. Although how these categories apply in various wars has always been contested, the core assumption is that these categories are designed to be an ethics of practical judgment (see Brown, 2010) for decision-makers to weigh potentially grave consequences of civilian casualties against overall war aims. However, the algorithmic construction of terrorists has radically shifted the idea of who qualifies as a combatant in warfare. What then are the ethical implications for researchers and practitioners for a computational ethics of war? (read more...)
Editor’s Note: This is the third post in our Law in Computation series. When we play an online game like World of Warcraft, where are we? This is not just a metaphysical question—are we in the fantasy world of Azeroth or in front of our computers—but a legal one as well. And there are multiple answers to that legal question. We might take a look at the space of intellectual property at the level of code and creation, whether corporate or by the players. There is also the space of law within the game, of the rules and norms guiding play (De Zwart and Humphreys 2014). What I’m concerned with here, though, are the servers, located in physical places, that connect players through infrastructures of connection whose worlds are sometimes disconnected by proprietary and computational decisions of game world owners. Servers keep online games alive. When online gamers talk about a game world being disconnected, they often point to the server as being “unplugged” or “turned off.” While official game servers are typically owned by game developers and corporations, players are now harnessing this power themselves, using privately-owned servers (“private servers”) as a viable solution for restoring and sustaining older versions of online games previously consigned to oblivion. But why? (read more...)
Editor’s Note: This is the inaugural post for the Law in Computation series, a collection of blog posts from faculty and graduate student fellows at UC Irvine’s Technology, Law and Society Institute. Leading up to a summer institute in 2018, the series provides examples of research and thinking from this interdisciplinary group and elaborates how sociolegal scholars might address new computing technologies, like artificial intelligence, blockchain, machine learning, autonomous vehicles, and more. In 2015, a robot buying illicit items off the “dark web” was confiscated by the Swiss authorities along with its haul of Ecstasy pills, a Hungarian passport, counterfeit designer clothing, and other items. Dubbed Random Darknet Shopper it was a bot programmed to shop on the dark web using Bitcoin, the pseudo-anonymous cryptocurrency that, at the time of my writing, is experiencing an enormous bubble. Previously assumed to be the domain of criminals or drug dealers, the Bitcoin bubble has made it more mainstream, even on popular television shows like The Daily Show and is being discussed at policy forums worldwide. It increased in value from just over $1000 to over $8000 between February 2017 and February 2018, with a peak at over $19,000 in mid-December 2017. While it was pretty obscure just a few months ago, you probably have a cousin or uncle currently “mining” Bitcoin or trading in similar digital tokens whether you know it or not. (read more...)
