Issue Archives

topic: Artificial Intelligence

Introduction Tim Wu’s essay, Will Artificial Intelligence Eat the Law?, posits that automated decisionmaking systems may be taking the place of hu­man adjudication in social media content moderation. Conventional adjudi­cative processes, he explains, are too slow or clumsy to keep up with the speed and scale of online information flows. Their eclipse is immi­nent, inevitable, […]

Complex machine learning models derived from personal data are increasingly used in making decisions important to peoples’ lives. These automated decision tools are controversial, in part because their opera­tion is difficult for humans to grasp or explain. While scholars and policy­makers have begun grappling with these explainability concerns, the debate has focused on explanations to decision subjects. This Essay ar­gues that explainability...

How will we assess the morality of decisions made by artificial intelli­gence—and will our judgments be swayed by what the law says? Focusing on a moral dilemma in which a driverless car chooses to sacrifice its passenger to save more people, this study offers evidence that our moral intuitions can be influenced by the presence of the law.

Sex robots are here. Created specifically to allow individuals to simulate erotic and romantic experiences with a seemingly alive and present human being, sex robots will soon force lawmakers to address the rise of digisexuality and the human–robot relationship. The extent to which intimacy between a human and robot can be regulated depends on how we characterize sex with robots—as a masturbatory act, an in­timate relationship, or nonconsensual...