Bryant Walker Smith’s research while affiliated with University of South Carolina and other places

Smart cities can be described as a smart system comprising numerous integrated smart systems that fuse and share data, including personal and potentially sensitive private information. Such circumstances could intrude on the rights to privacy, and human dignity, with disclosures potentially harmful to the individual, families, friends, associates, and communities. This workshop will examine ways to promote the best outcomes for the residents and visitors of smart cities through the lens of human rights. Affective rights will also be discussed as requisite to formulating the optimal smart city. Moreover, this workshop will foster discussion around the still relatively nascent technology of Affective Computing, which is the application of AI (Artificial Intelligence), ML (Machine Learning), biometric measurement, sentiment analysis, and psychological factor assessment in determining and interacting with the affective states of the individual. This workshop is open to all stakeholders in smart city development and management, including computer scientists, engineers, smart city integrators, application developers, third party vendors, ethicists, city managers and administrators. It should be especially informative for oversight and governance organizations providing auditing and performance evaluations.

For the first time in history, automated vehicles (AVs) are being deployed in populated environments. This unprecedented transformation of our everyday lives demands a significant undertaking: endowing complex autonomous systems with ethically acceptable behavior. We outline how one prominent, ethically relevant component of AVs-driving behavior-is inextricably linked to stakeholders in the technical, regulatory, and social spheres of the field. Whereas humans are presumed (rightly or wrongly) to have the "common sense" to behave ethically in new driving situations beyond a standard driving test, AVs do not (and probably should not) enjoy this presumption. We examine, at a high level, how to test the common sense of an AV. We start by reviewing discussions of "driverless dilemmas," adaptions of the traditional "trolley dilemmas" of philosophy that have sparked discussion on AV ethics but have limited use to the technical and legal spheres. Then, we explain how to substantially change the premises and features of these dilemmas (while preserving their behavioral diagnostic spirit) in order to lay the foundations for a more practical and relevant framework that tests driving common sense as an integral part of road rules testing.

Every road vehicle must have a driver able to control it while in motion. These requirements, explicit in two important conventions on road traffic, have an uncertain relationship to the automated motor vehicles that are currently under development—often colloquially called “self-driving” or “driverless.” The immediate legal and policy questions are straightforward: Are these requirements consistent with automated driving and, if not, how should the inconsistency be resolved? More subtle questions go directly to international law's role in a world that artificial intelligence is helping to rapidly change: In a showdown between a promising new technology and an entrenched treaty regime, which prevails? Should international law bend to avoid breaking? If so, what kind of flexibility is appropriate with respect to both the status and the substance of treaty obligations? And what role should deliberate ambiguity play in addressing these obligations? This essay raises these questions through the concrete case of automated driving. It introduces the road traffic conventions, identifies competing interpretations of their core driver requirements, and highlights ongoing efforts at the Global Forum for Road Traffic Safety to reach a consensus.

This article identifies a series of specific questions that reporters can ask about claims made by developers of automated motor vehicles (“AVs”). Its immediate intent is to facilitate more critical, credible, and ultimately constructive reporting on progress toward automated driving. In turn, reporting of this kind advances three additional goals. First, it encourages AV developers to qualify and support their public claims. Second, it appropriately manages public expectations about these vehicles. Third, it fosters more technical accuracy and technological circumspection in legal and policy scholarship.

This book chapter proposes model bills to clarify the legal status of automated driving at both the state and federal levels in the United States. The chapter briefly describes this current status, critiques my earlier legislative language, identifies other relevant efforts, presents the model state bill, and then presents the model federal bill. These models principally address the legal status of automated driving rather than the range of other relevant issues. Since they are likely to evolve, current versions are available at newlypossible.org/modellaws.

This chapter summarizes a longer policy paper, How Governments Can Promote Automated Driving, which details steps that state and local governments can take now to encourage the development, deployment, and use of automated road vehicles. The chapter has four main parts. Context emphasizes the need to think broadly about relevant technologies, impacts, and laws. Administrative Strategies identifies steps that governments can take in the course of their ordinary operations. Legal Strategies recommends a careful legal audit and provides guidance on the legal changes or clarifications that may flow from such an audit. Community Strategies focuses on ways that communities can prepare for and even attract truly driverless systems that are responsive to local needs and opportunities.

This chapter begins with two fundamental questions: How should risk be allocated in the face of significant uncertainty—and who should decide? Its focus on public actors reflects the significant role that legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts will play in answering these questions, whether through rules, investigations, verdicts, or other forms of public regulation. The eight strategies discussed in this chapter would in effect regulate that regulation. They seek to ensure that those who are injured can be compensated (by expanding public insurance and facilitating private insurance), that any prospective rules develop in tandem with the technologies to which they would apply (by privileging the concrete and delegating the safety case), that reasonable design choices receive sufficient legal support (by limiting the duration of risk and excluding the extreme), and that conventional driving is subject to as much scrutiny as automated driving (by rejecting the status quo and embracing enterprise liability).

The term driver assistance systems in the chapter title shall be understood to include vehicle automation. This chapter starts with a homogeneous and consistent classification and nomenclature of all kinds of driver assistance systems known and under discussion today (including vehicle automation). It thereby builds upon familiar classification schemes by the German Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt) and the standardization body SAE international. Detailed evaluation of the German legal situation for driver assistance systems and vehicle automation is provided in the following Sect. 2. In Sect. 3, an overview is given on the legal system in the US to reveal aspects relevant for vehicle automation. This is intended as initial information for those not acquainted to the US legal system which has been the first to regulate automation in several federal states. Finally, in Sect. 4, the current rating scheme of the European New Car Assessment Programme (EuroNCAP) is presented in comparison to legal instruments. The model of a consumer protection based approach proves to be a flexible instrument with great advantages in promoting new technologies. Technical vehicle regulations on the other hand rule minimum requirements. Both approaches are needed to achieve maximum vehicle safety.

Der Begriff der Fahrerassistenzsysteme im Sinn der Kapitelbezeichnung wie auch des vorliegenden Handbuches insgesamt soll hier die Fahrzeugautomatisierung mit erfassen. Für ein einheitliches Verständnis wird im vorliegenden Kapitel zunächst eine Kategorisierung von Systemen unter dem Gesichtspunkt ihrer Wirkung auf die Fahrzeugführung vorgeschlagen. Die von der BASt-Projektgruppe „Rechtsfolgen zunehmender Fahrzeugautomatisierung“ [1] entwickelte Nomenklatur von Automatisierungsgraden wird darunter eingeordnet und dargestellt. Auf dieser Basis werden im Anschluss wichtige rechtliche Rahmenbedingungen, vor allem das Verhaltensrecht und das Haftungsrecht nach deutschem Recht dargestellt und die Bedeutung für die unterschiedlichen Kategorien erläutert. In einem weiteren Abschnitt wird ein Überblick über den aktuellen Stand der Gesetzgebung in bestimmten Bundesstaaten der USA (Stand: Anfang 2014) gegeben, der zumeist den Einsatz von automatisierten Fahrzeugen mindestens zu Forschungs-, Entwicklungs- und Erprobungszwecken erlaubt. Das vorliegende Kapitel wendet sich sodann den übergreifenden Rahmenbedingungen des Verbraucherschutzes in Europa zu. Das im Rahmen von Euro NCAP geschaffene Bewertungssystem berücksichtigt zunehmend auch Fahrerassistenzsysteme bei der Bewertung von Fahrzeugsicherheit und entwickelt die Anforderungen beständig weiter.

Two complex and conflicting objectives shape altruistic regulation of human activity: maximizing net social good and mitigating incidental individual loss. Eminent domain provides a superficially simple example: To build a road that benefits ten thousand people, a government evicts – and compensates – the ten people whose homes are in the way. But in many cases, individual loss is not fully compensable, most strikingly when that loss involves death: Whatever her actual detriment, a person who dies cannot be “made whole.” And indeed, more than 30,000 people lose their lives on US roadways every year while more than 300 million obtain some direct or indirect benefit from motorized transport.