Do Consumers Need New Rules To Protect Them From Their Robots?

Do you understand your fiduciary duties? In his prescient 1942 short story, "Runaround," Isaac Azimov proposed a simple set of laws for robots: Yale Law School Professor Jack Balkin has come up with a few more laws for the age of Big Data, when gadgets like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa pose as kindly robot helpers but also collect terabytes of data about your Internet browsing habits, driving patterns and even conversations inside your home. "Think about the basic structure of the problem: We're going to bring into our houses, and use as agents, lots and lots of algorithmic programs," said Balkin, a First Amendment scholar and director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law. "The assumption most people make is they have a relationship with this thing, but what they have is a relationship with the company that makes and sells this thing." And that company may not always have the consumer's best interest in mind.