Real tweets, believed to be fake, produced genuinely fake news, believed to be real. The serpent of fakery, it seemed, had eaten its tail. At the center of this odd story was the increasingly unshakable suspicion that virtually everywhere we look humanity is besieged by undercover bots.
– from “You Might Be a Robot” by Mark Lemley and Bryan Casey, both of Stanford Law School

Stanford law professors Mark Lemley and Bryan Casey have outlined a conundrum: how can policymakers regulate something that isn’t easily defined?

As robots and artificial intelligence (AI) increase their influence over society, policymakers are increasingly regulating them. But to regulate these technologies, we first need to know what they are. And here we come to a problem. No one has been able to offer a decent definition of robots and AI — not even experts. What’s more, technological advances make it harder and harder each day to tell people from robots and robots from “dumb” machines.

A recent Bloomberg article examines how laws are starting to confuse people and machines. From “You Might Be a Robot. This Is Not a Joke.”:

A legal definition of artificial intelligence that perfectly captured the AI field as it exists today would probably be rendered useless by the next technological advance. If laws defined AI as it existed a decade ago, they’d probably have failed to cover today’s neural networks, which are used to teach machines to recognize speech and images, to identify candidate pharmaceuticals, and to play games like Go.

In Professors Lemley and Casey’s new article, “You Might Be a Robot,” they put forward: “Rather than trying in vain to find the perfect definition, we instead argue that policymakers should do as the great computer scientist, Alan Turing, did when confronted with the challenge of defining robots: embrace their ineffable nature.”

Below are a few excerpts from “You Might Be a Robot” by Mark Lemley and Bryan Casey.