Robots, Regulation, and the Changing Nature of Public Space

Robots are an increasingly common feature in North American public spaces. From regulations permitting broader drone use in public airspace and autonomous vehicle testing on public roads, to delivery robots roaming sidewalks in major US cities, to the announcement of Sidewalk Toronto — a plan to convert waterfront space in one of North America’s largest cities into a robotics-filled smart community — the laws regulating North American public spaces are opening up to robots. In many of these examples, the growing presence of robots in public space is associated with opportunities to improve human lives through intelligent urban design, environmental efficiency, and greater transportation accessibility. However, the introduction of robots into public space has also raised concerns about, for example: the commercialization of these spaces by the companies that deploy robots; increasing surveillance that will negatively impact physical and data privacy; or the potential marginalization or exclusion of some members of society in favor of those who can pay to access, use, or support the new technologies available in these spaces. Laws that permit, regulate, or prohibit robotic systems in public spaces will in many ways determine how this new technology impacts public space and the people who inhabit that space. This begs the questions: how should regulators approach the task of regulating robots in public spaces? And should any special considerations apply to the regulation of robots because of the public nature of the spaces they occupy? This paper argues that the laws that regulate robots deployed in public space will affect the public nature of that space, potentially to the benefit of some human inhabitants of the space over others. For these reasons, special considerations should apply to the regulation of robots that will operate in public space. In particular, the entry of a robotic system into a public space should never be prioritized over communal access to and use of that space by people. And, where a robotic system serves to make a space more accessible, lawmakers should avoid permitting differential access to that space through the regulation of that robotic system

Active seniors and old farts: Moral experiments between improvement, decline and the end of life in old age

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among elderly people in physical rehabilitation in Denmark, the article examines aging with disease and frailty as a process of moral becoming. Employing Cheryl Mattingly’s notion of Moral Laboratory (Mattingly 2014), the article shows how life in old age, when changed by disease and the onset of frailty, is marked by striving, failure and success in the endeavour to create a good life in a constant negotiation with the body that seems to have grown a will of its own. In the training centers the body is a malleable and controllable entity known through tests and training routines, underlining individual responsibility and an active senior life as a moral value. The body does not necessarily comply with the defined goals, and other possible futures come into play, where ‘old age’ can be an explanatory resource in accepting frailty as part of life and the end of life rehearsed and orchestrated

Reasonable Expectations of Privacy in an Era of Drones and Deepfakes: Expanding the Supreme Court of Canada’s Decision in R v Jarvis

Perpetrators of Technology-Facilitated gender-based violence are taking advantage of increasingly automated and sophisticated privacy-invasive tools to carry out their abuse. Whether this be monitoring movements through stalker-ware, using drones to non-consensually film or harass, or manipulating and distributing intimate images online such as deep-fakes and creepshots, invasions of privacy have become a significant form of gender-based violence. Accordingly, our normative and legal concepts of privacy must evolve to counter the harms arising from this misuse of new technology. Canada’s Supreme Court recently addressed Technology-Facilitated violations of privacy in the context of voyeurism in R v Jarvis (2019). The discussion of privacy in this decision appears to be a good first step toward a more equitable conceptualization of privacy protection. Building on existing privacy theories, this chapter examines what the reasoning in Jarvis might mean for “reasonable expectations of privacy” in other areas of law, and how this concept might be interpreted in response to gender-based Technology-Facilitated violence. The authors argue the courts in Canada and elsewhere must take the analysis in Jarvis further to fully realize a notion of privacy that protects the autonomy, dignity, and liberty of all

Geographic Mobility in the European Union: Optimising its Economic and Social Benefits

One of the founding principles of the European Union is the freedom of movement of workers (Article 39 of the Treaty establishing the European Community). The free movement of workers is essential for the creation of an area without internal frontiers, and for the strength-ening of economic and social cohesion and active citizenship.Taking an economic perspective, geographic mobility can have major positive effects by bringing about economic growth in countries with labour deficits and prosperity in countries with labour surplus. Hence, the diffusion of skills through occupational and geographic mo-bility is a central factor to enhance the productive capacity of firms and put regions or na-tional economies on a higher growth path. Taking a social perspective, geographical mobility has the potential of fostering social-cultural integration in the European Union, and strength-ening European identity and inter-cultural networks

Topology of Band-Like Excitations in Frustrated Magnets and Their Experimental Signatures

One of the most important revolutions in physics during the latter half of the 20thcentury must surely be the introduction of topology. Beginning with the discovery of the integer quantum Hall effect, modern condensed matter theory has now dis-covered a new class of phases with unconventional transport properties. The theory of topologically non-trivial electronic bands in solids is now extremely well-studied. Questions of where similar physics may arise with magnetic excitations have there-fore also gained attention. Magnons and other pseudo-particle spin-excitations forma diverse cast with distinct properties that may be important in quantum metrology or even quantum logic tasks and simulation. In this thesis, we investigate the band-topology of such excitations and their experimental signatures. In our study of the bilayer kagome Heisenberg model we investigate the unconventional excitations of a quantum paramagnet. We show that the Z2 topological invariant known from the time-reversal invariant quantum spin Hall system of electrons makes an appearance here. These are comparable, but not analogous to Krämers pairs in electron transport, and they can be characterized in a similar fashion, but they do not enjoy the same symmetry protection under time-reversal due to their bosonic nature. We describe how bond-nematic terms appear which destroy the Z2 phase. We also study the monolayer spin-polarized kagome Heisenberg model. Our representation theory of the bands allows for the determination of degeneracies as well as interactions which give rise to non-trivial band-gaps. We show how one may associate certain features in the neutron scattering spectra with topological ex-citations. We show that pinch-points and half-moon features found ubiquitously in neutron scattering experiments will undergo characteristic distortions when those bands carry Chern numbers. Our work paves the way for a more systematic experimental characterization and treatment of topologically gapped magnetic excitations and motivates experimental investigation of the spin Nernst effect in for instance quantum dimer mate-rials, or possibly in certain ferro-quadrupolar ordered solids.Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate Universit

Macroscopic quantum information processing using spin coherent states

Previously a new scheme of quantum information processing based on spin coherent states of two component Bose-Einstein condensates was proposed (Byrnes {\it et al.} Phys. Rev. A 85, 40306(R)). In this paper we give a more detailed exposition of the scheme, expanding on several aspects that were not discussed in full previously. The basic concept of the scheme is that spin coherent states are used instead of qubits to encode qubit information, and manipulated using collective spin operators. The scheme goes beyond the continuous variable regime such that the full space of the Bloch sphere is used. We construct a general framework for quantum algorithms to be executed using multiple spin coherent states, which are individually controlled. We illustrate the scheme by applications to quantum information protocols, and discuss possible experimental implementations. Decoherence effects are analyzed under both general conditions and for the experimental implementation proposed.Comment: published in Optics Communication August 201