Eben Moglen: Time To Apply The First Law Of Robotics To Our Smartphones

Isaac Asimov would not be proud.

Seventy years ago, Asimov created the “first law of robotics”: the idea that robots of the future would obey a rule rooted deep in their programming: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” By the year 2015, as his short stories predicted, even outmoded droid models would obey that maxim.

But now we’ve nearly reached that date. And according to free software pioneer, futurist and activist Eben Moglen, that fundamental law of robot ethics has yet to be coded into the most ubiquitous bots in our lives: our smartphones.

In a talk at the upcoming Hackers On Planet Earth conference in New York, he plans to argue that it’s high time we retrofitted our iPhones and Android handsets with the golden rule of robotics. If we don’t, he says, we may be serving our own robot overlords in ways we never expected.

I reached out to Moglen by phone for a preview of his talk, and despite receiving an unexpected call from me at 6am Korea Standard Time, the time zone where he’s currently traveling, he rattled off the following three minute second summary:

Columbia prof and Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center Eben Moglen

Those of us of my generation who were born in the middle of the 20th century, we grew up thinking about freedom and technology under the influence of the science fiction of the 1960s. In that science fiction, visionaries perceived that in the middle of the first quarter of the 21st century, we’d be living contemporarily with robots.

They were correct. We do. They don’t have hands and feet. They don’t carry drinks. They don’t push vacuum cleaners.  (Although sometimes they are vacuum cleaners.)

Most of the time we’re the bodies. We’re the hands and feet. We carry them everywhere we go. They see everything, they’re aware of our position, our relationship to other human beings and other robots, they mediate an information stream about us, which allows other people to predict and know our conduct and intentions and capabilities better than we can predict them ourselves.

But we grew up imagining that these robots would have, incorporated in their design, a set of principles. [Moglen recites the first law of robotics, which I've written above.]

We imagined that robots would be designed so that they could never hurt a human being. These robots have no such commitments. These robots hurt us every day.

They work for other people. They’re designed, built and managed to provide leverage and control to people other than their owners. Unless we retrofit the first law of robotics onto them immediately, we’re cooked.
They take our money. They take our autonomy. They spy on us. And around the world, they result in our arrest, beating, torture.

There are people right now being tortured because they took an iPhone to a demonstration or used Facebook to organize something political. Or they paid too much for something because the seller knew they would. Their insurance premiums are going up because their behavior is so known. Harm is being done to them socially, economically, medically.

Once your brain is working with a robot that doesn’t work for you, you’re not free. You’re an entity under control.

If you go back to the literature of fifty years ago, all these problems were foreseen. Many of us who grew up under the influence of those ideas, that we must make the technologies of freedom ahead of the technologies of control. Now we’re at the crucial moment. Human beings have begun to adopt technologies that control the details of our lives from the outside.

Though Moglen didn’t go into specifics, it’s easy to enough find examples of our mobile devices working counter to our interests in unexpected ways: iPhones that secretly store every location you’ve ever been, network operators selling entire cell phone towers’ worth of information to law enforcement, or weak encryption standards for mobile voice and data communications that some believe to be crackable by design.

So how do we take control? Merely switching from Apple’s more restrictive iOS to Android isn’t enough, Moglen says. “Android is primarily a gift to network operators, not a gift to individuals,” says Moglen. “Google and Verizon are in a soft merger. Android empowers them, not you.”

Even jailbreaking iPhones and rooting Android devices is only a first step, he adds. “That’s like taking the cover plate off the robot,” Moglen says. “But we have to deeply infiltrate the thing, all the way from the cloud to the device, and make it work the way people need it to work, not the way the network operators want it to work.”

Moglen isn’t known for his moderate stances on digital freedom issues. He’s described Steve Jobs as a “moral monster” and called  Mark Zuckerberg “ a little thug in a hooded sweatshirt” who “ has done more harm to the human race than anyone his age.”

For the past year, Moglen has been working to launch the FreedomBox, a cheap, small, plug-in computer that ultimately aims to allow a more decentralized and anonymous version of the Internet, encrypting email and running traffic through the Tor anonymization network and running social media applications on the distributed machines rather than centralized data centers through networks like Facebook competitor Diaspora.

Is Moglen suggesting a mobile version of that project? Not exactly, he says. “This, as it happens, is not a talk about technology projects. This is a talk about legal and ethical projects to people who will also, no doubt, understand the software engineering implicitly or explicitly involved,” he says. “I’m going to suggest where the social forces are coming from that can rebalance this system…Certain political adjustments are well past due.”