Ryan Calo

Ryan Calo is an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law and a former research director at CIS. A nationally recognized expert in law and emerging technology, Ryan's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wired Magazine, and other news outlets. Ryan serves on several advisory committees, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Future of Privacy Forum. He co-chairs the American Bar Association Committee on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence and serves on the program committee of National Robotics Week.

You can read Ryan's work on SSRN and follow him on Twitter.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Or: Why Weak AI Is Interesting Enough

By Ryan Calo • August 30, 2011 at 7:29 am

Not many people in the legal academy study artificial intelligence or robotics. One fellow enthusiast, Kenneth Anderson at American University, posed a provocative question over at Volokh Conspiracy yesterday: will the Nobel Prize for literature ever go to a software engineer who writes a program that writes a novel?

What I like about Ken’s question is its basic plausibility. Software has already composed original music and helped invent a new type of toothbrush. It does the majority of stock trading. Software could one day write a book. A focus on the achievable is also what I find compelling about Larry Solum’s exploration of whether AI might serve as an executor of a trust or Ian Kerr’s discussion of the effects of software agents on commerce. Read more » about The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Or: Why Weak AI Is Interesting Enough

Guest Blogging At Concurring Opinions

By Ryan Calo • August 11, 2011 at 9:11 pm

I'm guest blogging over at Concurring Opinions this month. My first post explored what the domestic use of drones would mean for privacy law. I also did a two-part post on "DRM for Privacy." Here is the first post. And the second. Excerpt below. Thoughts welcome.

Online privacy has been getting quite a bit of attention of late. But the problem seems as intractable as ever. In a pair of posts, I will explore one aspect of the online privacy debate and, drawing from a controversial corner of copyright law, suggest a modest fix. This first post discusses the problem of consumer tracking and the lack of any good solutions. You may want to skip this post if you are familiar with the online privacy ecosystem (and uninterested in correcting my oversimplifications and mistakes). The next post discusses how an often criticized provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act—the anti-circumvention clause—might hold lessons for consumer privacy. This provision prohibits tampering with so-called digital rights management. The law has its problems as a mechanism to enforce copyright. As applied to consumers’ efforts to protect their privacy, however, a few of Section 1201’s bugs metamorphose into features. Read more » about Guest Blogging At Concurring Opinions

Oklahoma To Nevada: You Can Have The Roads, We'll Take The Sky

By Ryan Calo • July 28, 2011 at 10:27 am

I have been blogging about Nevada's efforts to pave the way toward driverless vehicles in that state. Nevada recently become the first state to pass a law tasking the Department of Motorvehicles with developing a set of standards to license autonomous driving on the state's highways. In other words, Nevada is hoping for an early mover advantage in cornering this emerging technology. Reports are now surfacing that Oklahoma has taken steps to reserve an air corridor for the domestic use of autonomous drones. If approved by the Federal Aviation Administration, this would free up an 80 mile stretch for the military, hobbyists, and others to operate drones in U.S. airspace. One estimate places the number of domestic drones at 15,000 by 2018. Read more » about Oklahoma To Nevada: You Can Have The Roads, We'll Take The Sky

Nevada Governor Signs Driverless Car Bill Into Law

By Ryan Calo • June 22, 2011 at 11:28 am

According to the Nevada Legislature's website, AB 511 "revis[ing] certain provisions governing transportation" passed the Assembly (36-6) and the Senate (20-1) and was signed into law by the governor this week. Although I am aware of no law that prohibits driverless cars, this appears to be the first law officially to sanction the technology. Specifically, the law provides that the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles "shall adopt regulations authorizing the operation of autonomous vehicles on highways within the State of Nevada." The law charges the Nevada DMV with setting safety and performance standards and requires it to designate areas where driverless cars may be tested. (Note that this could take some serious time: Japan, for instance, has been promising standards for personal robots for years and has yet to release them.) Read more » about Nevada Governor Signs Driverless Car Bill Into Law

On The Legality Of Driverless Vehicles: A Response To Tyler Cowen

By Ryan Calo • June 8, 2011 at 12:18 pm

I agree with most everything economist Tyler Cowen said in his insightful New York Times op ed about autonomous vehicles. This technology holds tremendous promise in enhancing passenger safety, efficiency, and mobility. (See also Sebastian Thrun’s March 31 TED talk). I also agree that law and policy may act, as Cowen suggests, to impede innovation and adoption of driverless cars. But Cowen’s assertion that the driverless car “is illegal in all 50 states,” which he reasserts and defends in a recent blog post, represents a serious overstatement. And, in a way, an ironic one: the public assertion that driverless cars are illegal could be almost as chilling to potential innovators and consumers as passing laws against this technology. Read more » about On The Legality Of Driverless Vehicles: A Response To Tyler Cowen

Ryan Calo

Driverless Car Summit

Vehicle Automation: TRB @ Stanford

52nd Annual Workshop on Transportation Law

Big Data and Privacy: Making Ends Meet

Ryan Calo

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