2020. 11. 6.
The development of AI technology and its application in everyday life are already progressing at an explosive pace, whether we are aware of it or not. Simple examples we can find are voice recognition services applied to smartphones, which more than half the world's population has, or music streaming services, which recommends the music lists tailored for me. In addition, we use search engines with AI technology every day to search for various information. The expansion of the AI industry is expected to continue at an unprecedented rate thanks to “Big Data” and hardware with increasingly evolving processing power. Mark Cuban, an U.S. billionaire and well-known CEO, predicted that we should expect to “see more technological advances over the next ten years than we have over the last 30. It’s just going to blow everything away.”
The great impact on humanity may not only about the positive aspects. Numerous scholars are also concerned about many negative aspects of Big data, such as information bias in Big data, the trend of neglect of social justice and human rights, product liability for AI products, invasion of privacy rights, concerns about data security and hacking, and threats to humanity from the advent of super-intelligent systems. Everyday, they warn us of many negative aspects, ranging from the gap between the rich and the poor in access to the data to the level that threatens the survival of humanity itself.
In fact, the most urgent problem is that the both positive and negative aspects of AI mentioned above continue to expand in the absence of laws and regulations that directly govern them. There is too much gap between companies developing AI technology and the Congress or the courts that enact and apply relevant laws, and the gap is getting wider over time. Regarding the AI field which is not standardized and constantly evolving, it is a very important issue for legal professionals how to apply newly enacted laws and other existing laws scattered around, such as contracts, torts, product liability, intellectual property (patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, etc.), privacy, fair-trade and antitrust laws, etc., in harmony.
Through a series called “AI and Law,” I would like to discuss legal issues and related cases to be considered in relation to AI.