CEL Biennial Lecture : 'Rules for Robots: Building Legal Infrastructure for Artificial Intelligence'

UCL Centre for Ethics and Law Biennial Lecture

“Rules for Robots: Building Legal Infrastructure for Artificial Intelligence”

Lecturer: Gillian Hadfield (University of Toronto)

Chair: Richard Moorhead (UCL Laws)

About the lecture

Artificial intelligence promises great things: increased wealth, health, and the possibility of safer, fairer societies. But those promises cannot be realized without good legal infrastructure to ensure that AI is built and deployed in ways that are responsive to our publicly-set goals for humans and the planet. Two factors are colliding to put at serious risk our ability to accomplish those goals. One factor is the tremendous speed with which AI is advancing and spreading into just about every facet of the economy and society—to decide who gets access to credit or healthcare treatments, how our courts work, what kinds of vehicles are on our roads, how facial recognition is deployed, what is known about whom by whom. The other factor is the extreme resistance and structural barriers to change and innovation in our legal and policy systems: there is a real danger we will not figure out how to break out of dysfunctional lawmaking and regulatory systems in time to address the powerful challenges AI presents. In this talk, Professor Hadfield will lay out the responsibility facing our legal professions and institutions to reform quickly to address the mounting need for more effective regulatory tools to ensure that AI is safe and beneficial.

About the Lecturer

 Gillian Hadfield, B.A. (Hons.) Queens, J.D., M.A., Ph.D. (Economics) Stanford, is Professor of Law and Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto. Her research is focused on innovative design for legal and dispute resolution systems in advanced and developing market economies; governance for artificial intelligence; the markets for law, lawyers, and dispute resolution; and contract law and theory. Professor Hadfield is a Faculty Affiliate at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Toronto and at the Center for Human-Compatible AI at the University of California Berkeley and Senior Policy Advisor at OpenAI in San Francisco. Her book Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy  was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.

Professor Hadfield served as clerk to Chief Judge Patricia Wald on the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit. She was previously on the faculty at the University of Southern California, New York University, and the University of California Berkeley, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Harvard, Columbia, and Hastings College of Law. She was a 2006-07 and 2010-11 fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution in 1993. She has served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council for Technology, Values and Policy and Global Agenda Council for Justice and is currently a member of the American Bar Association’s Commission on the Future of Legal Education. She is an advisor to courts and several organizations and technology companies engaged in innovating new ways to make law smarter and more accessible.

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