Speculating Through Design Fiction

The world as we know it is on the threshold of a major turning point in the technological capabilities and promises of the vehicles we drive. Over the past few years, a proliferation of novel transportation, mobility and compute technologies has accelerated their confluence, with a myriad of incumbent and emerging companies advancing research and development to launch self-driving cars. The tremendous safety potential, reductions in greenhouse gas emissions due to the increased traffic efficiency, transformation of parking garages into new public spaces and automotive travel for those with a range of disabilities are just a few conjectured motivations for the widespread use of self-driving cars.

However, the design of systems, services and experiences that will be constructed upon these mobility platforms is a highly complex research domain, requiring a constant specific dialogue around what a world that reflects our daily interaction with self-driving technology would look like. The “self-driving vehicle” in a design context, along with novel practices to construct fictional narratives of the autonomous future, is becoming a more recognizable framework for designers. Yet the design innovations happening in interaction imaginaries to make the self-driving car user experience more welcoming and robust are only at their inception today. As an early emerging area of practice, many design ramifications are yet to be fully examined and addressed, particularly around consumer education and direct system interaction involving people and autonomous vehicles; this includes both occupied and unoccupied vehicles. 

Despite the significant technological progress in sustainable transportation, computer vision and urban network infrastructures, many key issues are yet to be answered about how these autonomous vehicles will be integrated on the roadways, how willingly people will adopt them as a part of their daily lives and what new types of human-centered design interaction will emerge as part of the built environment. Because autonomous driving has the potential to profoundly alter the way we move around and radically transform society in ways we yet can’t truly imagine, using it as a speculation basis can offer an insight into the creative processes today.

Modern Design and Critical Design Practice

“Post-design” practices, shaped by the accelerating pace of technological and digital transitions within contemporary cultural, social and economical processes, are no longer grounded in the commercial, rigid reality of the marketplace. But this was not always the case—traditionally, (industrial and product) design was defined and steered by the utilitarian practice to solve user-oriented, singular problems. In the past, technological developments, whether new products, services, or environments, often materialized in tangible design artifacts, underlying the fact that design was seen as a consumption-driving practice, primarily concerned with aesthetics, functionality and betterment of consumer’s socioeconomic standard of living. 

Nowadays, however, a new wave of designers depart from the conventional, previously dominant design practices. They embrace multidisciplinary approaches found in other scientific fields—psychology, computer sciences, engineering, anthropology, sociology and philosophy—as a way to foresee a wide range of technological consequences in a much broader social context, increasingly considering technology ramifications as they arise from different design options. Particularly, the proliferation of digital platforms, simultaneously constructed for billions of individual people, to a great extent propelled interaction design to became manifest in the distinctive social factors of new products and new user experiences. The common definition of interaction design describes it as creation of interactive products, application and services (digital artifacts) in which a designer focuses on the way users will interact with these technologies. The convergence of art, interaction design and technology have consequently led to the exploration and creation of new hybrid forms of cultural design spheres, blurring the lines between applications and implications. This new generation of designers focuses not only on the future consequences of technology on our everyday lives but on its social, economic and political role as well—moving away from tackling current issues to create speculative scenarios for the future.

Frog Design, a global design and strategy firm founded by industrial designer Hartmut Esslinger, uses such new techniques of storytelling to prompt discussion about the social and ethical implications of new technologies. The firm have devised ‘futurecasting’, a design methodology that allows designers to understand the underlying forces shaping the future, and then find ways to envision products, services and experiences that will create value in those possible futures. Instead of planning from the point of time where we are currently at and working forwards from here, futurecasting practice starts in the future and works backwards. By researching and evaluating how the world may change, identifying transformative trends, and what new products and services may be needed as a result, it helps to define the design steps to getting there and consider what social, economic and cultural aspects of human interaction will need to change. Depending on the technology focus and current development, the participants could be requested to only look a few years ahead or ten or more decades into the future—from the perspective of autonomous vehicles/transportation industry, changing the infrastructure, regulation and human behavior will take time, so the focus can be set five to ten years into the future. As an example in the self-driving vehicles domain, participants can be requested to imagine that one day humans are no longer allowed to drive or control their own vehicle within certain parts of Manhattan. More specifically, using a storytelling approach by the means of a design artifact (or ‘diegetic prototype' as discussed in the next section)—local media headlines announcing new driving rules go into effect or unveiling a new road sign that bans human drivers—participants would explain the steps involved in how the imagined future might have occurred and which auxiliary products or services might have emerged on the way. By presenting this future scenario and guiding participants to work through how they could collectively achieve (or plan to avoid) a certain aspect focused around a desired design interaction, such scenario analysis process encourages designers to think about what is possible rather than focusing on current processes or structures. The goal would be to understand the risks in the existing infrastructure models (such as skyrocketing rates in traffic and emissions, division of urban communities by a new network of transport routes, relegation to inconvenient pedestrian crosswalk points or emergence of high-priced inequitable mobility services) and opportunities and trends to improve on for a faster, frictionless adoption of self-driving technologies (slower and safer streets, deployment of zero emissions vehicles, affordable and reliable frequent mobility, and access for all ages and abilities). It is evident that futurecasting, a new kind of design and rebranded relative of speculative design, design fiction and critical design, eliminates creative thought constrains to present new solutions on how emerging technology can help redesign the way we live, work and travel around.

Speculating Through Design and Design Fictions

The practice of ‘speculative design’ or ‘design fiction’, where fictitious scenarios, implicitly constructed in the future transpire to expand the discourse of design as it is happening today, can be categorized as the most notable example of such experimental design practices. With critical thinking, design of objects generating a narrative or through the stories embodied in artifacts, designers attempt to anticipate the future and in the same time helps us to rethink the world of today. Speculative design, developed as a practice in the late 1990s by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby based on their work at the London Royal Collage of Art, is considered a discursive exercise rooted in critical design thinking, where “we might see the beginnings of a theoretical form of design dedicated to thinking, reflecting, inspiring, and providing new perspectives on some challenges facing us” (Dunne & Raby 2014). In their proclamation on how the design approach can be a source of creative thinking, rather than a rigid blueprint for problem-solving, the researchers suggest that through new speculative design practices it is possible “to create spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being, and to inspire and encourage people’s imaginations to flow freely” and where “design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality”. Therefore, by linking between the present and the envisioned future, the critical design approach, along with speculation design and design fiction, can be a powerful tool to encourage stimulating discussions on the possible implications of near-future cultural design environments within the technology realm. Through diverse visions of possible future scenarios by using design as a medium, speculative practice inspires thinking, raises awareness, examines, provokes actions, and has the ability to provide creative alternatives needed in the world today.

Its discursive social motivation can be seen in the various imaginative articulations created by the design company Superflux Lab. Through various design artifacts and installations, Superflux Lab have repeatedly augmented classic design and design disciplines into the practice of design fiction to explore the ramifications of the way people will think, communicate and act in the decades to come. Superflux design practice “work[s] at the intersection of emerging technologies and everyday life to design for a world in flux,” where responsible design explores the uncertainties of the present and requires thinking ahead as a lens to see implications for the future. 

More specifically, the Drone Aviary Project by Superflux is an important design fiction example that provokes a discussion around social, cultural and ethical implications of drone technology in the future urban landscape and mobilities design. The studio has built a fleet of of five unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), designed to be autonomously deployed and used in cities for surveillance, traffic control and (even) advertising. The accompanying short project film interfaces this novel mobility platform with urban dynamics from the perspective of drones. It consists of footage shot from various drones designed for a different purpose as they fly through London, scanning people and objects and capturing data. Speaking in an interview with the web-based Center for the Study of the Drone, Superflux Lab’s co-founder Anab Jain referred to their design fiction work on the Drone Aviary project as “a representation of a wider interest in thinking about how we might live with such technology in the near future ... our intent is to raise questions about who owns airspace and what a civic space is when it comes to airspace ... it’s this sort of vertical geography, how do you dig into that, how do you design it, what is its relationship to the rest of our built environment”. 

Despite the fact that only a small number of such projects might come into existence exactly as envisioned, the relevance of continuous social discussion through these design artifacts, diegetic prototypes and interaction becomes even more desirable. This not-so-far-reaching future-oriented design approach leads to various situational interpretations of the uncertainties in our possible everyday life, where drones are used to continuously monitor public spaces. From the perspective of a situational understanding of emerging technologies, my thoughts echoe a similar need of applying design fiction discipline to illustrate the world of self-driving vehicles and its public policies.

Design Fiction. Design fiction is a critical design discipline that is synonymous to a new wave of creative practices such as ethnofuturism, science fiction prototyping, diegetic prototyping, anticipatory ethnography, western melancholy, speculative design and others. These disciplines, as expressed by the designer James Auger, “remove the constraints from the commercial sector that define normative design processes; use models and prototypes at the heart of the enquiry; and use fiction to present alternative products, systems or worlds”. Such creative processes can be a powerful tool to encourage designers and users to believe that technological change, such as self-driving cars, is plausible and probable.

In practice, design fiction is a tangible extension of speculative design concept that allows designers to prototype physical objects, reflecting on how they envision the future to be. Although its origins are unclear, the earliest use of the term appears to be by Bruce Sterling, a Hugo Award-winning sci-fi writer, in his book Shaping Things in 2005, where he describes design fiction as something similar to science fiction. More recently, Sterling offered a formal definition, as “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change”. It is both a discipline and a method—a designer travels in his/her mind to imagine an object, gives it a tangible form and then constructs a narrative by “placing the object in a new world” for his/her audience. Therefore, design fiction hinges upon a ‘diegetic prototype’, along with the context a designer choses to present it within ‘cognitive estrangement’ cues to the audience, or cues that facilitate temporal break in one’s perception of current time and place. 

Diegetic Prototypes. David Kirby, a professor of science communication studies within University of Manchester’s Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, used the term of diegetic prototype to “account for the ways in which cinematic depictions of future technologies demonstrate to large public audiences a technology’s need, viability and benevolence”. Similar to props used on stage or on screen, the diegetic prototype can be thus interpreted as an element of design or object that seemingly exists within the created fictional world the audience is experiencing. Julian Bleecker, a researcher and product designer-engineer, argues that traditional prototypes are merely a representation of a general concept, they represent “coherent functionality, but they lack a visionary story about what makes them conversant on important matters-of-concern”. The diegetic prototype, on the other hand, is a functional piece of technology within a fictional world—it is far superior in its ability to help craft more immersive stories than a regular prototype and design an alternative present. But while it may be easier for one observer to suspend disbelief by immersing oneself into the designer’s work of fiction than another, the entire framework of the presented design elements must follow logical flow in order to be effective—even if a certain technology concept does not yet exist, it has to be logically framed within a set of governed logical principles and perceived as possible. 

Through immersive user experience concepts and rendering them tangible for the audience, design fiction can be regarded as a thought-experiment in creativity, freed from the constraints of reality and intended to change the way designers think about today’s world and tomorrow’s. As such, it embodies the essential foundation of modern design philosophy: crafting coherent narrative elements to invoke a meaningful concept in an emotionally human context. These practices—design fiction, speculative design, critical design—allow the designer to probe, explore, and critique possible interactions of its audience with future products and services, exposing the social, environmental and ethical implications of emerging technologies in the process.

Design Fiction Practices Within Self-Driving and Mobility Technologies 

With the current scale and complexity of emerging technologies, now, more than ever, we are already living in the future—augmented/virtual reality, 3-D printing, artificial intelligence, bionics, reusable rocket boosters, and electric cars among others—this development is unequivocally reflected in the increasing preeminence of design elements as envisioned by science fiction, discussed and presented in conferences, journals and research papers about design fiction, speculative design, and critical design. To envision these technologies, some of the largest companies also frequently sponsor lecture series in which sci-fi creators give talks to design teams and even actively hire sci-fi writers to create concept narratives about potentially marketable products. The ability to construct discourses around near-future technological ramifications is instrumental to the practice of design fiction. And while design fiction has been broadly used as an emerging practice by corporations and research communities engaged in interface and HRI design, with its explicit focus on the future, there is still much to explore within the design fiction domain—in particular, how it can be adopted for interaction design within a particular technology application of self-driving cars. 

Speculative design narratives have plenty of sources of inspiration in science fiction and imaginary worlds—cars have been driving themselves in literary and cinematic science fiction for many years. Blade Runner (1982), Minority Report (2002), I, Robot (2004) among many others depict cars that required no human operator. In 1982, Michael Knight, a relentless crime fighter in the TV series Knight Rider, drives around in Knight Industries Two Thousand, or KITT, an artificially intelligent and self-conscious Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am. 1990’s Total Recall depicted the now infamous Johnny Cab, a fully autonomous taxi featuring a robotic head and torso in the form of a 1950’s style bus driver that ushers a protagonist while conversing and whistling tunes. But what once was considered the realm of science fiction, autonomous vehicles driving in the urban and rural environments are getting closer to become a reality.

Design Fiction and Emerging Mobility Technologies. Thus far, little has been explored on the application of design fiction in the technological sphere of self-driving cars and interaction design. In 2009 however, Near Future Laboratory (NFL) used the practice of design fiction to create the Quick Start Guide—the user manual diegetic prototype for a fictional self-driving vehicle from the near future—to provoke a conversation on how interaction design could meet the new challenges posed by self-driving vehicles with much larger and complex ecosystem. Quick Start Guide is an imaginative manual of a future self-driving car system, outlining the principles of owning and operating such vehicle. Over the course of design fiction process, the designers constructed and imagined key systems of such vehicle, envisioning how they would interact with its user and the logical steps for their use. More specifically, according to its designers’ vision, the manual highlights what one’s spatial and situational senses would look like once the user interacts with the car or without it. 

By using the Quick Start Guide format as a design fiction diegetic prototype, this approach provided an opportunity to raise the discussion around specific points of interaction concern without addressing larger questions of technical feasibility. For example, in the FAQ section of the document, the question “Is there a published fee structure for timed-parking?” indicates that sending your autonomous vehicle as a part of the ride-hailing service to streets and highways costs less than parking it throughout the day—suggesting new thinking around the opportunities reutilizing the sheer amount of urban space used by parking garages and curbsides today.

Moreover, it raises questions around new definitions of “primary rider” and one’s personal liability as “owner-operator” towards third-party riders who “may use/lease/rent your vehicle” after it was sent off, setting up a discussion around regulatory framework one would face in owning and operating a self-driving car (“By assuming your position as primary rider you assumer liability for the vehicle and other passengers in the vehicle in correspondence with federal law”). The team indicated that the Quick Start Guide “brought to life experiences in a very tangible, compelling fashion for designers, engineers, and anyone else involved in the development of a technology” and that “this approach leads to better thinking around new products”. It is apparent that adopting the practice of design fiction was useful to create a partial yet compelling vision of what life in the self-driving future could be like, questioning designers’ preconceptions about the role that self-driving vehicles could play in the future. 

Design Education and Expanding Creativity Sphere

Design fiction, as a practice that focuses on imaginary realities and conceptual storytelling, can be seen effective form of inspiration, but one that raises broad questions about the nature, purpose and teaching of design as a creative practice in education. In 2013, MIT Media Lab created a Design Fictions group led by Hiromi Ozaki, the British-Japanese designer known as Sputniko!, to explore the tangible benefits of such speculations. The Design Fictions Group has been investigating how to provoke imagination about the social, cultural, and ethical implications of new technologies through design and storytelling—evolving the role of the modern designer and extending the definition of classic design. Designers at the Design Fictions Group are taught to continuously challenge themselves as they learn and draw from disciplines beyond the reaches of their past experience or understanding. Engineers and designers at the group are encouraged to work on projects that can’t be framed under traditional classic practices, intentionally attempting to stretch the definition of design and creativity. As some thoughts and ideas shrink the space of what's possible (no way!) and some make it larger (what if?), design fiction has a natural bias towards the latter.

Employing design fiction to explore a wide range of human-centered interactions with autonomous vehicles is becoming an important field of both practice and research, encompassing product design, technological interfaces and social behavior. For the designers engaging in critical design thinking and working on emerging self-driving technologies, exposing the concept of fictional narratives and evolving them into meaningful diegetic prototypes proves to be a successful and useful approach. By positioning and examining self-driving technology in the context of near-future everyday life, designers are able to engage in a constructing dialogue of its effects between interaction design, functionality and social norms.

Legal Personhood for Artificial Intelligences

They kept hooking hardware into him – decision-action boxes to let him boss other computers, bank on bank of additional memories, more banks of associational neural nets,’ another tubful of twelve-digit random numbers, a greatly augmented temporary memory. Human brain has around ten-to-tenth neurons. By third year Mike has better than one and a half times that number of neuristors. And woke up.

― The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein

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Following Google I/O, Google's annual developer conference, where the company revealed the roadmap for highly-intelligent conversational AI and a bot-powered platform, as artificial intelligence disrupts how we live our lives, redefining how we would interact with present and future technology tools by automating things in a new way, it is inevitable we all have to imbibe the automated life gospel. One of the steps into that life is trying to unify the scope of the current technological advancements into a coherent framework of thought by exploring how current law applies to different sets of legal rights regarding artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence may generally be defined as the intelligence possessed by machines or software used to operate machines. It also encompasses the academic field of study that is more widely known as computer science. The basic premise of this field of study is that scientists can engineer intelligent agents that are capable of making accurate perceptions concerning their environment. These agents are then able to make correct actions based on these perceptions. The discipline of artificial intelligence explores the possibility of passing on traits that human beings possess as intelligent beings. These include knowledge, reasoning, the ability to learn and plan, perception, movement of objects and communication using language. As an academic field, it may be described as being interdisciplinary, as it combines sciences such as mathematics, computer science, and neuroscience as well as professional studies such as linguistics, psychology and philosophy. Professionals involved in the development of artificial intelligence use different tools to get machines to simulate characteristics of intelligence only found in humans.

But artificial intelligence only follows the lead of the already omnipresent challenges and changes to the existing legal frameworks. The twenty first century is undoubtedly the age of information and technology. Exciting scientific breakthroughs continue to be experienced as innovators work to create better, more intelligent and energy efficient machines. Rapid information technology development has posed challenges to several areas of law both domestically and internationally. Many of these challenges have been discussed at length and continue to be addressed through reforms of existing laws.

The trend towards reform of law to keep up with the growth of technology can also be illustrated by observing the use of social media to generate content. As social media has continued to grow and influence the world, international media law has recognized citizen journalism. The traditional role of journalists has been to generate and disseminate information. As the world’s population has gained increased access to smart devices, ordinary people have been able to capture breaking stories that are then uploaded to the internet through several platforms. This has eroded the sharp distinction that previously existed between professional journalists and ordinary citizens, as the internet provides alternatives to traditional news media sources.

There are innumerable examples of other ways in which information technology has caused changes in the existing legislative structures. The law is naturally elastic, and can be expanded or amended to adapt to the new circumstances created by technological advancement. The continued development of artificial intelligence, however, may challenge the expansive character of the law because it presents an entirely novel situation. To begin with, artificial intelligence raises philosophical questions concerning the nature of the minds of human beings. These philosophical questions are connected to legal and ethical issues of creating machines that are programmed to possess the qualities that are innate and unique to human beings. If machines can be built to behave like humans, then they must be accorded some form of legal personality, similar to that which humans have. At the very least, the law must make provision for the changes that advanced artificial intelligence will cause in the society through the introduction of a new species capable of rational, logical thought. By deriving general guidelines based on the case law of the past, it should aid the lawmakers to close the gap on technological singularity.

Legal personality endows its subjects with the capacity to have rights and obligations before the law. Without legal personality, there is no legal standing to conduct any binding transactions both domestically and internationally. Legal personality is divided into two categories. Human beings are regarded as natural or physical persons. The second category encompasses non-living legal subjects who are artificial but nonetheless treated as persons by the law. This is a fundamental concept in corporate law and international law. Corporations, states and international legal organizations are treated as persons before the law and are known as juridical persons. Without legal personality, there can be no basis upon which legal rights and duties can be established.

Natural persons have a wide array of rights that are recognized and protected by law. Civil and political rights protect an individual’s freedoms to self-expression, assemble, information, own property and self-determination. Social and economic rights acknowledge the individual’s fundamental needs to lead a dignified and productive life. These include the right to education, healthcare, adequate food, decent housing and shelter. As artificial intelligence continues to develop, and smarter machines are produced, it may be necessary to grant these machines legal personality.

This may seem like far-fetched scientific fiction, but it is in fact closer to reality than the general population is aware of. Computer scientists are at the frontline of designing cutting edge software and advanced robots that could revolutionize the way human live. Just like Turing’s machine was able to accomplish feats that were impossible for human mathematicians, scientists, and cryptologists, during World War II, the robots of the future will be able to think and act autonomously. Similarly, the positive implications of increased capacity to produce artificial intelligence, is the development of powerful machines. These machines could solve many of the problems that continue to hinder human progress such as disease, hunger, adverse weather and aging. The science of artificial intelligence would make it possible to program these machines to provide solutions to human problems, and their superior abilities would make it possible to find these solutions within a short period of time instead of decades or centuries.

The current legal framework does not provide an underlying definition of what determines whether a certain entity acquires legal rights. The philosophical approach does not yet distinguish between strong and weak forms of artificial intelligence.

Weak artificial intelligence merely facilitates a tool for enhancing human technological abilities. A running application comprising artificial intelligence aspects, such as Siri, represents only a simulation of a cognitive process but does not constitute a cognitive process itself. Strong artificial intelligence, on the other hand, suggests that a software application in principle can be designed to become aware of itself, become intelligent, understand, have perception of the world, and present cognitive states that are associated with the human mind.

The prospects for the development and use of artificial intelligence are exciting, but this narrative would be incomplete without making mention of the possible dangers as well. Humans may retain some level of remote control but the possibility that these created objects could rise up to positions of dominance over human beings is certainly a great concern. With the use of machines and the continual improvement of existing technology, some scientists are convinced that it is only a matter of time before artificial intelligence surpasses that of human intelligence.

Secondly, ethicists and philosophers have questioned whether it is sound to pass on innate characteristics of human beings on to machines if this could ultimately mean that the human race will become subject to these machines. Perhaps increased use of artificial intelligence to produce machines may dehumanize society, as functions that were previously carried out in the society become mechanized. In the past mechanization has resulted in loss of jobs as manpower is no longer required when machines can do the work. Reflections on history reveal that machines have assisted humans to make work easier, but it has not been possible to achieve an idyllic existence simply because machines exist.

Lastly, if this advanced software should fall into the hands of criminals, terrorist organizations or states that are set against peace and non-violence, the consequences would be dire. Criminal organizations could expand dangerous networks across the world using technological tools. Machines could be trained to kill or maim victims. Criminals could remotely control machines to commit crimes in different geographical areas. Software could be programmed to steal sensitive private information and incentivize corporate espionage.

The "singularity” is a term that was first coined by Vernor Vinge to describe a theoretical situation where machines created by humans develop superior intelligence and end the era of human dominance that would be as intelligent or more intelligent that human mind, using the exponential growth of computing power, based on the law of accelerating returns, combined with human understanding of the complexity of the brain.

As highlighted earlier, strong artificial intelligence that matches or surpasses human intelligence has not yet been developed, although its development has been envisioned. Strong artificial intelligence is a prominent theme in many science fiction movies probably because the notion of a super computer with the ability to outsmart humans is very interesting. In the meantime, before this science fiction dream can become a reality, weak artificial intelligence has slowly become a commonplace part of everyday life. Search engines and smart phone apps are the most common examples of weak artificial intelligence. These programs are simply designed and possess the ability to mimic simple aspects of human intelligence. Google is able to search for information on the web using key words or phrases inserted in by the user. The scenario of dominance by artificial intelligence seems a long way off from the current status quo. However, the launch of chatbots points towards the direction artificial intelligence will take in the near future using weak artificial intelligence.

Chatbots are the next link in the evolution chain of virtual personal assistants, such as Siri. Siri is the shortened version of the Scandinavian name Sigrid which means beauty or victory. It is a virtual personal assistant that is able to mimic human elements of interaction as it carries out its duties. The program is enabled with a speech function that enables it to reply to queries as well as take audio instructions. This is impressive as it does not require the user to type instructions. Siri is able to decode a verbal message, understand the instructions given and act on these instructions. Siri is able to provide information when requested to do so. It can also send text messages, organize personal schedules, book appointments and take note of important meetings on behalf of its user. Another impressive feature of the program is its ability to collect information about the user. As the user gives more instructions Siri stores this information and uses it to refine the services it offers to the user. The excitement that has greeted the successful launch of Siri within the mass market is imaginable. After Siri, came the chatbots. Chatbots are a type of conversational agent, a software designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via auditory or textual methods. The technology may be considered as weak artificial intelligence, but the abilities demonstrated by the program offer a glimpse into what the future holds for artificial intelligence development. For legal regulators virtual personal assistants' features demand that existing structures be reviewed to accommodate the novel circumstances that its use has introduced. As more programs like Siri contitnue to be commercialized, these new legal grey areas will feature more often in mainstream debate. Intellectual property law and liability law will probably be the areas most affected by uptake of chatbots by consumers.

Intellectual property law creates ownership rights for creators or inventors, to protect their interests in the works they create. Copyright law in particular, protects artistic creations by controlling the means by which these creations are distributed. The owners of copyright are then able to use their artistic works to earn an income. Anyone else who wants to deal with the creative works for profit or personal use must get authorization from the copyright owner. Persons who infringe on copyright are liable to face civil suits, arrest and fines. In the case of chatbots, the owner of the sounds produced by the program has not been clearly defined. It is quite likely that in the near future, these sounds will become a lucrative form of creative work and when that does happen it will be imperative that the law defines who the owner of these sounds is. Users are capable of using chatbot's features to mix different sounds, including works protected by copyright, to come up with new sounds. In this case, the law is unclear whether such content would be considered to be new content or whether it would be attributed to the original producers of the sound.

Another important question that would have to be addressed would be the issue of ownership between the creators of artificial intelligence programs, the users of such programs and those who utilize the output produced by the programs. A case could be made that the creators of the program are the original authors and are entitled to copyright the works that are produced using such a program. As artificial intelligence gains popularity within the society and more people have access to machines and programs like Siri, it is inevitable that conflicts of ownership will arise as different people battle to be recognized as the owner of the works produced. From the perspective of intellectual property, artificial intelligence cannot be left within the public domain. Due to its innate value and its capacity to generate new content, there will definitely be ownership wrangles. The law therefore needs to provide clarity and guidance on who has the right to claim ownership.

Law enforcement agents must constantly innovate in order to successfully investigate crime. Although the internet has made it easier to commit certain crimes, programs such as the ‘Sweetie’, avatar run by the charity Terres des Hommes based in Holland, illustrate how artificial intelligence can help to solve crime. The Sweetie avatar was developed by the charity to help investigate sex tourists who targeted children online. The offenders in such crimes engage in sexual acts with children from developing countries. The children are lured into the illicit practice with promises that they will be paid for their participation. After making contact and confirming that the children are indeed underage, the offenders then request the children to perform sexual acts in front of the cameras. The offenders may also perform sexual acts and request the children to view them.

The offenders prey on vulnerable children who often come from poor developing countries. The children are physically and mentally exploited to gratify offenders from wealthy Western countries. In October 2014, the Sweetie avatar project experienced its first successful conviction of a sex predator. The man, an Australian national named Scott Robert Hansen admitted that he had sent nude images of himself performing obscene acts to Sweetie. Hansen also pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography. Both these offenses were violations of previous orders issued against him as a repeat sexual offender. Sweetie is an app that is able to mimic the movements of a real ten year old girl. The 3D model is very lifelike, and the app allows for natural interactions such as typing during chats, nodding in response to questions asked or comments made. The app also makes it possible for the operator to move the 3D model from side to side in its seat. Hansen fell for the ploy and believed that Sweetie was a real child.

According to the court, it was immaterial that Sweetie did not exist. Hansen was guilty because he believed that she was a real child and his intention was to perform obscene acts in front of her. Although Hansen was the only person to be convicted as a result of the Terres des Hommes project, researchers working on it had patrolled the internet for ten weeks. In that time, thousands of men had gotten in touch with Sweetie. Terres des Hommes compiled a list of one thousand suspects which was handed over to Interpol and state police agencies for further investigations. The Sweetie project illustrates that artificial intelligence can be utilized to investigate difficult crimes such as sex tourism. The biggest benefit of such a project is that it created an avatar that was very convincing and removed the need to use real people in the undercover operation. In addition the project had an ideal way of collecting evidence through use of a form of artificial intelligence that was very difficult to contradict. Thus, in a way, artificial intelligence provided grounds for challenging the already existing legal rights of the accused

Presently the law provides different standards of liability for those who break the law. In criminal law, a person is liable for criminal activity if they demonstrate that they have both a guilty mind (the settled intent to commit a crime) and they performed the guilty act in line with this intent. In civil cases liability for wrongdoing can be reduced based on mitigating factors such as the contributory negligence of the other party. There is currently no explicit provision in law that allows defendants to escape liability by claiming that they relied on incorrect advice from an intelligent machine. However, with increased reliance on artificial intelligence to guide basic daily tasks, the law will eventually have to address this question. If a user of artificial intelligence software makes a mistake while acting on information from the software, they may suffer losses or damages arising from the mistake. In such cases the developers of the software may be required to compensate the user or incur liability for the consequences of their software’s failure. If machines can be built with the ability to make critical decisions, it is important to have a clear idea of who will be held accountable for the actions of the machine.

Autonomous driverless cars represent an interesting example of the inception for such decisions to be made in the future. Florida, Nevada, Michigan, and D.C. states have also passed laws allowing autonomous cars driving on their streets in some capacity. The question to how autonomous cars might lead to the change of the liability and ethical rights stands upon software ethical settings that might control self-driving vehicles to prioritize human lives over financial or property loss. The numerous ethical dilemmas revolving around autonomous cars choosing to save passengers over saving a child’s life could arise. The lawmakers, regulators and standards organizations should develop concise legal principles upon which such ethical questions will be addressed by defining a liable entity.

Turing, one of the fathers of modern computer science and artificial intelligence, envisioned a world in which machines could be designed to think independently and solve problems. Modern scientists still share Turing’s vision. It is this vision that inspires countless mathematicians and developers around the world to continue on designing better software applications with greater capabilities. The scientific community and the society at large, have several positive expectations concerning artificial intelligence and the potential benefits humankind could reap from its development. Intelligent machines have the potential to make our daily lives easer as well as unlock mysteries that cannot be solved by human ingenuity. They also have the potential to end the dominance of human beings on this planet. The need for law to be reformed with regard to artificial intelligence is apparent. As the world heads into the next scientific era with both excitement and fear, the law must find a way to adjust the new circumstances created by machines that can think. As we involve artificial intelligence more in our lives and try to learn about its legal implications, there will undoubtedly be changes needed to be applied.