Does this help define “cyber war?”

https://www.databreaches.net/merck-settles-coverage-dispute-with-insurers-over-war-exclusion-in-notpetya-attack/

Merck Settles Coverage Dispute With Insurers Over War Exclusion in NotPetya Attack

Insurance Journal reports:

Merck & Co. Inc. has reportedly reached a deal with insurers over a closely-watched coverage dispute related to a massive cyberattack in 2017.

The New Jersey Supreme Court in July 2023 agreed to hear the case after a state appeals court ruled months prior against eight insurers, finding that a hostile/warlike action exclusion in an all risks property insurance policy did not apply to a Russian-linked cyberattack known as “NotPetya” on the pharmaceutical firm.

More than 30 insurers were involved in the case at the start, but many have since resolved their claims with Merck. Eight insurers that remained in the case included Ace American, Allianz, Liberty Mutual, QBE, XL and Lloyd’s syndicates. Merck’s property insurance program included the “all risks” property policies in a three-layer structure, with $1.75 billion in total limits above a $150 million deductible. The remaining eight insurers’ policies insured percentages of coverage in one, two or all three of the layers. In total, they disputed about $700 million in coverage or just under 40% of Merck’s total coverage for the policy period.

Read more at Insurance Journal. The case is Merck Co., Inc. v. ACE Am. Ins. Co., N.J., No. A-62/63-22, case settled 1/3/24.

Perspective.

https://the-decoder.com/a-survey-of-2778-researchers-shows-how-fragmented-the-ai-science-community-is/

A survey of 2,778 researchers shows how fragmented the AI science community is

The "2023 Expert Survey on Progress in AI" shows that the scientific community has no consensus on the risks and opportunities of AI, but everything is moving faster than once thought.

Even Issac Asimov considered the three laws as incomplete. He added a fourth law in “Robots and Empire.” “A robot cannot cause harm to mankind or, by inaction, allow mankind to come to harm.”

https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/4/24025535/google-ai-robot-constitution-autort-deepmind-three-laws

Google wrote a ‘Robot Constitution’ to make sure its new AI droids won’t kill us

The data gathering system AutoRT applies safety guardrails inspired by Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.

(Related) Thinking about AI…

https://cosmosinstitute.substack.com/p/existential-pessimism-vs-accelerationism

Existential Pessimism vs. Accelerationism: Why Tech Needs a Rational, Humanistic "Third Way"

… As technologists, we should feel a sense of urgency at this moment. AI has opened a new continent, and humanity is setting foot on its shores. How we explore this unmapped terrain with its opportunities and dangers will shape the course of civilization.

A Mean Between Two Extremes

Two notions of technology currently dominate our culture: existential pessimism and accelerationism. I’ll argue that neither presents a genuinely positive vision for humanity's future.

Existential pessimism, an apocalyptic, almost eschatological warning of risk, animated by quantification, dominates many practitioner circles. Like Oppenheimer, some of AI’s earliest creators now denounce their creation in hubristic awe of their own power. They advocate for the rationalist remaking of society based on risk avoidance.

On the other hand, accelerationism argues that economic growth and technological progress are the sole ends of human life. Humanity is reduced to a variable in a thermodynamic equation, a link in an evolutionary chain. The dignity of the individual, rooted in both classical ideas of virtue and liberal notions of freedom, is forgotten. They say we must liberate AI from human guidance. That we must unleash its development. Material uplift becomes a shallow substitute for virtue and human flourishing.

Always amusing.

https://www.bespacific.com/disqualification-of-a-candidate-for-the-presidency-part-ii/

Disqualification of a Candidate for the Presidency, Part II

CRS Legal Sidebar, December 28, 2023: Disqualification of a Candidate for the Presidency, Part II: Examining Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment as It Applies to Ballot Access: “Numerous lawsuits across the country have sought or are seeking to prevent former President Donald Trump from appearing on state ballots for the upcoming presidential elections. In particular, these suits, filed in both state and federal courts, are requesting that various secretaries of state exclude the former President from the states’ ballots for the upcoming presidential primary and general elections. Plaintiffs allege that Trump’s efforts to impede the congressional certification of the 2020 electoral college vote by, among other things, urging his supporters to march to the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, amount to “engag[ing] in insurrection” within the meaning of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Plaintiffs contend that the former President is therefore disqualified as a candidate for the presidency. Many of the lawsuits challenging Trump’s ability to be placed on state ballots have been dismissed by courts on jurisdictional grounds without reaching the merits of the constitutional claims. On December 19, 2023, the Colorado Supreme Court became the first court to hold that former President Trump is ineligible to appear on the ballot because he is constitutionally disqualified from holding the office of the President, and the court directed the Colorado secretary of state to exclude the former President’s name from the state’s 2024 presidential primary ballot. That decision has been stayed until January 4, potentially enabling Trump the opportunity to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court before it goes into effect. (As of the date of this Sidebar, the Colorado Republican State Central Committee has reportedly filed a petition of certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the state court ruling.)..”

(Related)

https://www.bespacific.com/tracking-section-3-trump-disqualification-challenges/

Tracking Section 3 Trump Disqualification Challenges

Lawfaremedia.org: “Almost immediately after Jan. 6, 2021, legal commentators began debating whether Section 3 of the 14th Amendment could be used to disqualify former President Donald Trump from running in the 2024 presidential election. They discussed, in particular, whether or not Section 3 applies to a former president, whether it is self-executing, and whether Jan. 6 could be considered an insurrection or rebellion. Since then, the issue has become less abstract, though no less contentious. In February 2021, the U.S. Senate acquitted Trump of an impeachment article for inciting insurrection, but with a bipartisan majority of the Senate voting to convict. Section 3 challenges have been mounted against several legislators, and one state-level county commissioner who participated in the attack was successfully ousted from his post under that provision. At the end of 2022, the House Select Committee on the Jan. 6 Attack on the Capitol made the argument that Trump did inspire an insurrection, referring him to the Justice Department for prosecution under multiple criminal statutes, including one prohibiting insurrection. The Special Counsel’s Office has since brought a criminal case in Washington, D.C. charging Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 attack. And some prominent legal conservatives have made the case for a strong, originalist reading of Section 3 that they argue would apply to Trump, immediately disqualifying him from office. Beginning in winter 2023, voters and advocacy groups have brought Section 3 challenges in courts across the country, attempting to block Trump’s name from appearing on ballots for state primaries and caucuses before the general election begins. On Dec. 19, the Colorado Supreme Court became the first in the nation to rule that Trump is disqualified under Section 3 and cannot be listed as a candidate on the state’s primary ballot. Petitions for certiorari are currently pending in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. This page is intended to track which states have active Section 3 litigation to remove Trump from the 2024 ballot. At the bottom is a selected reading of Lawfare‘s coverage on the issue. Note that the procedural posture and legal theories behind these challenges vary greatly, and a dismissal in any particular action does not necessarily bar other challenges from being brought in that same state.”

See also Vox: “The Supreme Court arguments for (and against) removing Trump from the ballot, explained. The Constitution has a right to defend itself, but Trump also has a right to due process.”

Politicians don’t have the ‘excuse’ that they hallucinate.

https://www.ft.com/content/5da52770-b474-4547-8d1b-9c46a3c3bac9

Forget technology — politicians pose the gravest misinformation threat

… Most recently, Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has warned of how “AI-created hyper-realistic bots will make the spread of disinformation easier and the manipulation of media for use in deepfake campaigns will likely become more advanced”. This is similar to warnings from many other public authorities, which ignore the misinformation from the most senior levels of domestic politics. In the US, the Washington Post stopped counting after documenting at least 30,573 false or misleading claims made by Donald Trump as president. In the UK, the non-profit FullFact has reported that as many as 50 MPs — including two prime ministers, cabinet ministers and shadow cabinet ministers — failed to correct false, unevidenced or misleading claims in 2022 alone, despite repeated calls to do so.

It’s an idea. Is it good or bad? Ask the psychbot?

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2024/01/02/rise-of-the-ai-psychbots-00133487

Rise of the AI psychbots

… The story of psychologist Martin Seligman and his AI counterpart “Ask Martin” forces us to think hard about some questions that current tech policy is ill-suited to handle, such as what part of ourselves we “own,” how the law diverges from our own instinctive sense of justice — and also, what digital version of us may survive into the future, whether or not we want it to.

The story published late last week in POLITICO Magazine and has already sparked conversations online among researchers, AI ethicists and copyright experts.

Here’s an excerpt:

Martin Seligman, the influential American psychologist, found himself pondering his legacy at a dinner party in San Francisco one late February evening. The guest list was shorter than it used to be: Seligman is 81, and six of his colleagues had died in the early COVID years. His thinking had already left a profound mark on the field of positive psychology, but the closer he came to his own death, the more compelled he felt to help his work survive.

The next morning he received an unexpected email from an old graduate student, Yukun Zhao. His message was as simple as it was astonishing: Zhao’s team had created a “virtual Seligman.”

Zhao wasn’t just bragging. Over two months, by feeding every word Seligman had ever written into cutting-edge AI software, he and his team had built an eerily accurate version of Seligman himself — a talking chatbot whose answers drew deeply from Seligman’s ideas, whose prose sounded like a folksier version of Seligman’s own speech and whose wisdom anyone could access.

Tools & Techniques. How should we slice up an industry? An AI guide might be worth developing…

https://www.neowin.net/news/ai-powered-microsoft-word-add-on-for-lawyers-raises-26-million-in-new-funding/

AI-powered Microsoft Word add-on for lawyers raises $26 million in new funding

… The company has developed a Microsoft Word add-on that uses generative AI to automate and speed up the process of drafting and negotiating contracts. It can also be used for pulling out key information from contract repositories using a search feature.

… If you are interested in trying out the software, Robin AI says you can find it for free by heading to its website.

Interesting in many ways. Is this China being subtle?

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/01/tiktok-editorial-analysis.html

TikTok Editorial Analysis

TikTok seems to be skewing things in the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. (This is a serious analysis, and the methodology looks sound.)

Conclusion: Substantial Differences in Hashtag Ratios Raise Concerns about TikTok’s Impartiality

Given the research above, we assess a strong possibility that content on TikTok is either amplified or suppressed based on its alignment with the interests of the Chinese Government. Future research should aim towards a more comprehensive analysis to determine the potential influence of TikTok on popular public narratives. This research should determine if and how TikTok might be utilized for furthering national/regional or international objectives of the Chinese Government.

A summary…

https://www.deweybstrategic.com/2023/12/standing-on-the-threshold-of-change-2023-in-review-a-somewhat-irreverent-review-of-the-ai-hysteria-that-swept-through-the-legal-industry.html

Standing on the threshold of change: 2023 in review (A somewhat irreverent review of the AI hysteria That Swept Through the Legal Industry)

I have lived through legal technology revolutions before. The conversion of legal research from print to online moved though law firms like slow rolling train. Lexis, the first commercial online legal research product launched in 1970. Many firms did not fully embrace online research and abandon print until the pandemic drove the profession to remote work, nearly 50 years later. Analytics in legal research provided dramatic new insights into the behavior of judges, courts, attorneys and clients. It took less than ten years following the launch of Lex Machina in 2013 for legal analytics to move from esoteric to essential. The promise of, if not the practice with Generative AI swept like a wildfire through the legal information market. When ChatGPT launched it took only five days to reach a million users and by January 2023 (2 months later) it had a 100 million users. Enter the “hype cycle.”

Probably not the best predictor of AI law…

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/can-driverless-cars-get-tickets-california-law-rcna131538

Driverless cars immune from traffic tickets in California under current laws

… “It seems like while they make fewer of the kind of mistakes that we see from human drivers, they make interesting new kinds of mistakes,” Raicu said. “It has the feel of a human subject mass experiment, right? Without the kind of consent that we usually want to see as part of that.”

… But NBC Bay Area has learned that when driverless cars break the rules of the road, there’s not much law enforcement can do. In California, traffic tickets can be written only if there is an actual driver in the car.

… Texas, which rivals California as another popular testing ground for autonomous vehicles, changed its transportation laws in 2017 to adapt to the emerging technology. According to the Texas Transportation Code, the owner of a driverless car is “considered the operator” and can be cited for breaking traffic laws “regardless of whether the person is physically present in the vehicle.”

Arizona, another busy site for autonomous vehicles, took similar steps. In revising its traffic laws, Arizona declared the owner of an autonomous vehicle “may be issued a traffic citation or other applicable penalty if the vehicle fails to comply with traffic or motor vehicle laws.”

And hackers will develop similar technology to embed the same information in AI generated images.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Nikon-Sony-and-Canon-fight-AI-fakes-with-new-camera-tech

Nikon, Sony and Canon fight AI fakes with new camera tech

Nikon, Sony Group and Canon are developing camera technology that embeds digital signatures in images so that they can be distinguished from increasingly sophisticated fakes.

Nikon will offer mirrorless cameras with authentication technology for photojournalists and other professionals. The tamper-resistant digital signatures will include such information as date, time, location and photographer.

Lawyers need ethical AI or ethical lawyers need AI?

https://journal.formosapublisher.org/index.php/fjss/article/view/7451

Ethical Challenges in the Practice of the Legal Profession in the Digital Era

Ethical challenges in legal practice in the digital era present significant debate along with the development of information technology. This article explores aspects of data privacy and security, the impact of social media, and the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in legal decision-making. Through a literature review and mixed qualitative and quantitative research methodology, this article discusses the implications of the use of technology, particularly AI, in legal practice and highlights the importance of considering ethical values

(Related)

https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3631935

News: Why Are Lawyers Afraid of AI?

… Perlman analogized the release of user-friendly generative AI with three precursor "Aha" moments: the development of the Internet, the release of the Google search engine, and the release of the Apple iPhone. However, he thinks generative AI also may have a revolutionary effect on the legal industry compared to the evolutionary, if profound, effects the other landmark technologies did.

As Perlman pointed out in his (and ChatGPT's) paper, a significant part of lawyers' work takes the form of written words: email, memos, motions, briefs, complaints, discovery requests and responses, transactional documents of all kinds, and so forth.

"Although existing technology has made the generation of these words easier in some respects, such as by allowing us to use templates and automated document assembly tools, these tools have changed most lawyers' work in relatively modest ways," he wrote in his paper's preface. "In contrast, AI tools like ChatGPT hold the promise of altering how we generate a much wider range of legal documents and information."

Perhaps an interim step? (I hope not.)

https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/blr/vol89/iss1/5/

Rise of the Machines: The Future of Intellectual Property Rights in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not new to generating outputs considered suitable for intellectual property (IP) protection. However, recent technological advancements have made it possible for AI to transform from a mere tool used to assist in developing IP to the mind behind novel artistic works and inventions. One particular AI, DABUS, has done just so. Yet, while technology has advanced, IP law has not. This note sets out to provide a solution to the legal concerns raised by AI in IP law, specifically in the context of AI authorship and inventorship. The DABUS test case offers a model framework for analyzing the different approaches that domestic and foreign courts, as well as IP offices, have adopted to address the issue of AI-generated IP. Despite the variety of solutions that exist and that have been proposed globally, no country has identified an optimal approach to balance encouraging innovation with the need to protect human authors and inventors. This note proposes expanding the Patent Act and Copyright Act to include a new type of IP right, called Digiwork, available exclusively to AI-generated IP. Digiwork patents and copyrights would be property of the AI machine’s owner, or alternatively of the person who commissioned the work, with the AI itself listed as the “source” rather than as an author or inventor of the IP. By granting IP protection to AI-generated outputs, Digiwork rights would promote the use of highly sophisticated AI to generate value for the economy and society. At the same time, they would also safeguard human authorship and inventorship by precluding AI from taking over a legal space they were not meant to occupy.

I hope this is an uncommon perspective…

https://philosophyjournal.spbu.ru/article/view/14218

AI and the Metaphor of the Divine

The idea of God is one of the most profound in human culture. Previously considered mainly in metaphysical and ethical discussions, it has now become part of the discourse in the philosophy of technology. The metaphor of God is used by some authors to represent the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the modern world. The article explores four aspects of this metaphor: creation, omniscience, mystery, theodicy. The creative act shows the similarity of man with God, including in the sense that technology, being created by people, at the same time can get out of the control of the creator. AI's ability to use streams of data for analytics and prediction can be presented as "omniscience" and appears mysterious due to the inability of humans to fully understand the workings of AI. The discussion about building ethics into AI technology shows a desire to add another feature to omniscience and omnipotence, namely omnibenevolence. The metaphor of God in relation to AI reveals human fears and aspirations both in rational-pragmatic and symbolic terms. Like other technologies, AI aims to satisfy the human desire for more power. At the same time, the metaphor of God indicates the power of technology over man. It reveals the transcendental in modern ideas about technology and at the same time can contribute to the discussion about what the technological design of AI should be, since the roles of the employee or communicator already lead to thinking that AI is designed more perfectly.

AI isn’t trying to kill us. (You know I’m going to drag SciFi into this blog whenever I can.)

https://www.proquest.com/openview/b5e7b80dc2f8e70618511450189a593d/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y

Narrating Posthuman Identities in Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries and Selected Short Stories of Isaac Asimov