IOT, EOT… EIEIO
The Internet of Things, or the IoT, has brought about incredible leaps in innovation and improvement in the quality of life in general and in previously unimaginable ways. The impacts on convenience, economics, healthcare, transportation, information technology and gathering… the list is practically endless. It is nearly impossible now, at least for people in developed countries, to even contemplate living life without the IoT. In fact, literally all the services and products we are heavily reliant on for everyday life are driven at least in part by the IoT.
I recently had a conversation with a longtime friend, an extraordinary attorney on product liability issues. I was seeking out his thoughts around not the IoT, but the EoT, the Ethics of Things. We are frequently engaged by our clients to discuss a variety of topics that they struggle with. Some of you may recall a recent blog post on the legality (and enforceability) of a COVID-19 vaccine mandate, also driven by conversations with clients. In the past year, we have helped clients think through a broad range of issues from the discrete, such as mask mandates in the workplace and remote work, to broader policy issues such as the impact on BREXIT, #metoo, and scores of others.
Technology and the Ethics of Things
Lately, we have had a number of very interesting conversations about technology and the EoT. Getting the thoughts of well-informed people on emerging topics is important to me to assist me in gauging my own thinking. Some parts of the conversation dealt with tort liability and, more specifically, insulation of manufacturers from tort liability. Tort liability, in a nutshell, is the legal concept where one person causes damage, injury, or harm to another person or property and incurs liability, meaning that person has the legal and financial responsibility to make the injured party whole.
In many cases, manufacturers have successfully lobbied for decades for protection from liability for their products, the most common being cigarette manufacturers and firearms manufacturers seeking to avoid liability for damages from the use of properly functioning cigarettes and guns. For many years in most jurisdictions, as long as the product is operating in the manner in which it was intended and was without defect, the onus was on the user of the product and not the manufacturer of the product for its safe use. Although this long-entrenched rule holding that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” has now been reversed in many states, including California, it still exists as a minority view.
The query from our customers is related to the blurring of the lines caused by machine learning and artificial intelligence. We are asked: “What about bots in the workplace? They use machine learning to adapt and grow past the hardware, software, and data with which they were created and now consume data of their own choosing and derive their own decisions.” If harm to persons or property is caused by those decisions, who is at fault?
The manufacturer did not include those decisions in the product when the bot was made. The software was not specifically designed to include them. In fact, they can literally be the impact of thousands of comments from people on the IoT to which the bot is exposed that combine to derive its unique “thought” or course of action. Nonetheless, the thought then made action by the device may well have an adverse impact causing harm to persons or property.
There can be certain responsibility around the company to have proper boundaries for the bot in terms of its learned decision making, so in that regard there is likely some liability for the company in the event of a “bot gone wild.” It is not an unreasonable expectation for a company to put guard rails in place to control decision-making that can cause personal injury or property damage by the bot, but there are other issues that we confront with employees. The solutions are not physical boundaries, but ethical ones. That is where the real issue here lies.
Policy Violations by the IoT
Play out a scenario – say there was some type of a policy breach reported and the investigation determines that the cause was not the action of an individual but was due to the action or inaction of a device. Further, the cause was not due to a product defect or improper use, but due to a derived response based on machine learning. If it were a human respondent, we would know how to resolve the issue – termination, written warning, additional training, etc. But it is not a human, it is a thing – one of many growing billions of things in the IoT!
Do your processes have the adequate steps in place to assess a policy violation cause by an IoT device? What kind of resolutions exist in your systems to cope with these challenges, which will certainly proliferate as the IoT grows?
Thinking through EoT, the Ethics of Things, cannot start too soon. If you do not plan now to cope with this complex and growing dilemma, you will be pushed to crisis management and policies and processes that are not well thought out when you are faced with a challenge of this type.
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MEET THE AUTHOR
J Rollins is the co-founder and CEO of ETHIX360. J is a well known leader and innovator who has served on senior leadership teams ranging in responsibility from Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, SVP of Product Strategy and Chief Operating Officer.
ABOUT ETHIX360
At ETHIX360, our goal is simple: to provide an affordable, flexible, and comprehensive answer to employee communication, policy management, corporate training and case management on issues related to corporate ethics, code of conduct, fraud, bribery, and workplace violence.
