An Average Thursday in the Near Future

You wake up to an alarm clock that has gone off a half hour earlier than it did the day before because it knows your Thursday schedule is different from your Wednesday schedule. You shower, and the shower changes its temperature and stream settings because it knows the difference between how you like your shower and how your roommate/husband/wife/girlfriend/ boyfriend/partner/hetero-lifemate likes his/her shower. You pick up your coffee, which was ready more or less when you entered the kitchen because the alarm clock commiserated with the coffee machine.

On the drive to work, you watch Sports Center while your GoogleCar automatically transports you. At work, you read a variety of TPS reports that have been researched and written by a computer program. Over lunch, you read a new novel, also written by a program. After work, you listen to an album of music that was also written by a program.

A couple questions about what happens during a not-so average Thursday in the near future:

• If your GoogleCar hits someone and breaks her leg, how much liability do you have for that injury?

• If you use portions of the report, novel , and music that were written by programs to produce successful advertising, have you infringed on a copyright? Whose?

This hypothetical Thursday and these questions are coming up, a lot sooner than we think. Supposedly, Google will have a car available commercially sometime around 2016. There are already programs writing sports reports, most prominently maintaining reports from every college basketball game last season (which is good for a Georgetown fan like me – at the rate the Big East is going, no major news outlet will cover the Hoyas’ games in another couple seasons).

While other people grapple with the problem of job-stealing robots, I’m more interested in the way we’ll have to re-imagine our laws to deal with non-humans doing human things. Will robots become the corporations of the 21st century, gaining constitutional rights and recognition as quasi-people? Will we create a techno-digi-common, where robot-made ideas are owned by everyone? Will robot owners automatically own the creations of their machines, much like dog owners are responsible for scooping up after their dogs? I think these are fascinating questions that will have an impact on many legal practices. Before our robot overlords get here, I want to be ahead of the curve.