Punishing Artificial Intelligence: Legal Fiction or Science Fiction

Whether causing flash crashes in financial markets, purchasing illegal drugs, or running over pedestrians, AI is increasingly engaging in activity that would be criminal for a natural person, or even an artificial person like a corporation. We argue that criminal law falls short in cases where an AI causes certain types of harm and there are no practically or legally identifiable upstream criminal actors. This Article explores potential solutions to this problem, focusing on holding AI directly criminally liable where it is acting autonomously and irreducibly. Conventional wisdom holds that punishing AI is incongruous with basic criminal law principles such as the capacity for culpability and the requirement of a guilty mind. Drawing on analogies to corporate and strict criminal liability, as well as familiar imputation principles, we show how a coherent theoretical case can be constructed for AI punishment. AI punishment could result in general deterrence and expressive benefits, and it need not run afoul of negative limitations such as punishing in excess of culpability. Ultimately, however, punishing AI is not justified, because it might entail significant costs and it would certainly require radical legal changes. Modest changes to existing criminal laws that target persons, together with potentially expanded civil liability, are a better solution to AI crime

Improving Corporate Criminal Fines: A Reply to W. Robert Thomas

In response to W. Robert Thomas, The Ability and Responsibility of Corporate Law to Improve Criminal Fines, 78 Ohio St. L.J. 601 (2017)

Willful Ignorance, Culpability, and the Criminal Law

(Excerpt) The overriding aim of this Article is to shore up the normative basis for the willful ignorance doctrine and to clarify what is needed to arrive at a version of this doctrine that adequately respects its normative foundations

Dirty Discourse: Birth Control Advertising in the 1920s and 1930s

This dissertation returns to an era when the American Medical Association did not consider contraception part of medicine. In the 1920s and 1930s, women shopped for diaphragms in Bloomingdales, ordered contraceptive douche from the Sears catalogue, and browsed for birth control bargains in drugstore windows. Ironically, contraceptive sales transpired even though a federal obscenity law made selling contraception illegal, along with contraceptive advertising and any form of birth control information. Advertisers camouflaged their products behind commonly understood euphemisms, like feminine hygiene, and the law left them alone. The goal of the birth control movement in the 19205 and 1930s was to take power away from the commercial advertiser and place it in the hands of the physician. This study adds a new dimension to birth control history by considering the important and heretofore unexamined fact that contraceptive advertising existed, even though the ads were illegal, and that the advertisements played an important role in birth control advocacy. Birth control advocates convinced doctors to control the contraceptive field through rhetorical strategies that created distinctions between scientific and commercial contraception. Scientists were still developing laboratory tests to evaluate a contraceptive\u27s effectiveness in the 1930s. Any difference between medical and non-medical contraception was not in the product\u27s chemical make-up, but rather the communication strategies that determined a given contraceptive\u27s hierarchical place. Birth control advocates fought hard to legalize contraception through medical approval and to make reliable contraceptive information readily available -- but not readily available through a medium that used the sexually desiring body to sell contraception. Advocates attached a clean, chaste meaning to birth control, a meaning that disassociated birth control from the sexed bodies that use it. They transformed birth control information into a discreet language that catered only to the medical profession to legitimate the public support of physicians and legislators. They succeeded. Commercial birth control advertising subsequently faded away and sixty years later, birth control is one of popular culture\u27s best kept historical secrets

Resolving Judicial Dilemmas

The legal reasons that bind a judge and the moral reasons that bind all persons can sometimes pull in different directions. There is perhaps no starker example of such judicial dilemmas than in criminal sentencing. Particularly where mandatory minimum sentences are triggered, a judge can be forced to impose sentences that even the judge regards as “immensely cruel, if not barbaric.” Beyond those directly harmed by overly harsh laws, some courts have recognized that “judges who, forced to participate in such inhumane acts, suffer a loss of dignity and humanity as well.” When faced with such a judicial dilemma—a powerful tension between the judge’s legal and moral reasons—the primary question is what a judge can do to resolve it. We argue that the two standard responses—sacrificing morality to respect the law (“legalism”), or sacrificing the law to respect morality (“moralism”)—are unsatisfying. Instead, this Article defends an underexplored third response: rather than abandoning one ideal to maximally promote the other, we argue that judges should seek to at least minimally satisfy the demands of both. Judges should, in other words, look for and employ what we dub Satisficing Options. These are actions that enjoy sufficient support from both the legal reasons and the moral reasons, and thus are both legally and morally permissible—even if the acts in question would not strictly count as optimal by the lights of the law or morality. This common sensical response to the problem is not only underappreciated in the literature, but also has great practical import. Focusing on the sentencing context, this Article demonstrates that judicial dilemmas can be systematically resolved, mitigated or avoided through a range of concrete strategies that on their own or in conjunction can constitute Satisficing Options: these strategies include seeking out legally permitted but morally preferable interpretations of the law, expressing condemnation of unjust laws in dicta, and seeking assistance or cooperation from other actors to help defendants facing substantively unjust mandatory sentences. While these strategies can at times also go too far, we argue that in certain contexts they can be sufficiently defensible on both legal and moral grounds to be a justifiable response to judicial dilemmas. This Article thus provides both a novel theoretical framework for understanding the justification of judicial responses to unjust laws, as well as a practical a menu of options which judges can use to guide their responses to the judicial dilemmas that they are increasingly likely to encounter within our criminal justice system

Institutional Evolution at Lake Chad: Traditional Administration and Flexible Fisheries Management

Lake Chad is a vitally important wetland in the semi-arid Sahel corridor. It provides the basis of many thousands of livelihoods which depend on its seasonal fluctuations to renew fish stocks, farmland and rangeland. This paper describes how the institutions which govern access to fishing rights has evolved on the Nigerian shore of the lake. The paper aims to assess the applicability of different institutional approaches to fisheries management on the lake’s floodplain. These include: the ‘equilibrium or tragedy’ approach characterized by Hardin (1968); critiques of state attempts at regulating natural resources exploitation in the Sahel; models of institutional adaptation to resource scarcity; and approaches which perceive institutions for resource access as a crucial determinant of social and economic development. The western shore of Lake Chad has been under the jurisdiction of Borno State in its various guises since the end of the fourteenth century and is currently one of 36 states in the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Although the administrative status of Borno has varied, it has been dominated by a Kanuri aristocracy for most of its existence. Traditionally, the Kanuri administration has played a crucial role in allocating access to farm land. In recent years, the ‘Kanuri administration’ has not only maintained its pre-colonial authority over farming on the lake shore, but has expanded it to cover new areas of the lake floor and the increasingly lucrative fishing opportunities which federal government has been unable to regulate. This success suggests that collaboration with the traditional administration is essential to the success of future natural resource management efforts.Keywords: Lake Chad, natural resource management, land tenure, fisheries management, sustainable rural livelihood

Stochastic dynamics of microcavity polaritons

We study the time dependent polariton condensation as well as the parametric scattering process of polaritons in a semiconductor microcavity. Based upon a new stochastic scheme the dynamics for both cases is fully analyzed. We show how the evolution of the system is described by a set of stochastic differential Schrodinger equations which in average reproduces the exact dynamics. Furthermore, we underline the role that Coulomb correlations plays in the polariton dynamics. Threshold behaviors are well captured by the present approach. The results are in complete agreement with recent experimental observations.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures. To appear in Solid State Communication

Open-Ended Instructable Embodied Agents with Memory-Augmented Large Language Models

Pre-trained and frozen large language models (LLMs) can effectively map simple scene rearrangement instructions to programs over a robot's visuomotor functions through appropriate few-shot example prompting. To parse open-domain natural language and adapt to a user's idiosyncratic procedures, not known during prompt engineering time, fixed prompts fall short. In this paper, we introduce HELPER, an embodied agent equipped with an external memory of language-program pairs that parses free-form human-robot dialogue into action programs through retrieval-augmented LLM prompting: relevant memories are retrieved based on the current dialogue, instruction, correction, or VLM description, and used as in-context prompt examples for LLM querying. The memory is expanded during deployment to include pairs of user's language and action plans, to assist future inferences and personalize them to the user's language and routines. HELPER sets a new state-of-the-art in the TEACh benchmark in both Execution from Dialog History (EDH) and Trajectory from Dialogue (TfD), with a 1.7x improvement over the previous state-of-the-art for TfD. Our models, code, and video results can be found in our project's website: https://helper-agent-llm.github.io.Comment: Project page with code & videos: https://helper-agent-llm.github.i