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Black Mirror Legal Discussion Group
TBA
- Blog post about using Black Mirror episodes to anchor discussion as a form of innovative legal education: https://medium.com/@GTeninbaum/popular-tv-as-a-tool-for-thinking-about-the-future-of-technology-law-society-59ae9c14aa30#.nz37dbwbj
- Black Mirror Episode Summary: https://computationallaw.org/summary-and-analysis-nosedive-black-mirror-episode-3-season-1-951a8c129eb5#.vgnwjuwaj
- Wikipedia article on Black Mirror series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror
I think the approach should just be to post it individually and incorporate by reference into the event description for the evening. This way, when writing up future event descriptions and discussion points it will be easy to reference and even reuse part of all of the any prior episode and situational descriptions but exclusively in reference to whatever the future topic, theme or context is. If the discussion and plot summaries are all merged together it makes it hard to reuse connected scenarios demonstrating relevant technology functionality or common plot points. Even if the issue one night for rating tech is, say, intentional interference with beneficial contractual relations or severe infliction of emotional distress etc one should be able to cleanly encapsulate the underlying tools and tech as part of a totally different topic another night, such as economic rights of publicity or first amendment issues related to subjects in public or violations of "reasonable" expectations of privacy or whatever the legal topic might be.
... I will make a functional draft blog post about the event series where we can publish updates and announcements (but not change the URL, so any tweets/posts/email/etc links can accumulate rather than stratify). When we start to collaborate on this in a more focused and specific manner (ie - around a date/time and signup sheet, etc) I'd like to discuss embedding a form in the page for simple feedback and preliminary sharing of ideas or questions (especially nominations of additional or alternative discussion questions, analysis of the fundamental legal or social challenges posed by the episode and potential ways of addressing avoiding or somehow transcending those challenges. Here is a link to a draft page: https://law.mit.edu/blog/black-mirror-legal-discussion-group
1 making it slightly lighter weight with maybe invited "discussion starters" but not a load of time / emphasis on experts pontificating (basic concept is "no keynotes, no panels, no talking heads" and "more people talking, more turn taking, more multi-point idea flow") and
2 focus on dystopian dimensions is necessary and it is great (perfect actually) for law schools) but it isn't a focus of people who build things. The media lab is for the latter focus. Problems are relevant and one important input to the design and building of new things but not a focus in an of themselves. The focus I wrote out in my email to you might have had some key questions and themes that reflected some version of the question "what is the shape of the solution space within which we can build things that work well under the circumstances" or higher level "what circumstances would be necessary and how can we generate those circumstances" of lower level "what types of specific things can we build" etc. this is a creative, design focused and engineering approach that is more constructive and a better fit for housing at or with the media lab. It is also more in turn what something I personally would be more up for collaboration on. I think this vantage point appeared in your approach but it was not the focus. The next discussion group would have the concentrated choose videos to raise the key issues and invite experts or thought leaders to facilitate discussion that surfaces many ideas and goes deeper into some approaches that relate to "how could we design, engineer and build the business, legal and technology systems that solve the problem presented or (better yet) transcend the challenge altogether.
- two or three Black Mirror episodes and 1-2 dates to popcorn and chat informally about them at the media lab, 2) so I reserve a good space and make a blog post that you and I are doing this
[regarding] building learning experiences around TV shows that raise key emerging legal and ethical questions about AI and "extended cognition". I was thinking that a regular discussion group starting with the screening of an episode to anchor facilitated discussion would be a good way to surface, enumerate, cluster and curate key issues while building relationships/momentum for your presence here and developing inputs needed for later crafting of formal curricula.
I think there are actually a few important series that provide grist for this mill, including the modern "Battlestar Galactica" and more recent "Humans" (the second season which which just started), among others, as an entry to questions of law and legal/public policy arising from AI autonomous entities carrying out important functions and activities and perhaps possessing consciousness and life. The best single video raising this issue to date in my opinion is the Next Generation episode "measure of a man" chronicling litigation about whether Commander Data is a person with individual rights or property of Star Fleet. Evidently "Humans" will be reprising this question in a modern British trial context this season.
As a measure of cadence to ensure useful progress I'd propose an "Episode Per Issue". Some episodes are especially well suited to sketch the scope and dynamics of particularly important issues whole also providing understandable factual situations giving rise to and adjacent or downstream ramifications of those issues.
In general I'd suggest nominating several candidate episodes from top priority series to start with and selecting a few (maybe 2-5) episodes (or key scenes) that directly raise articulable legal "issues" with a defined AI (or other relevant technology) "idea" or "innovation" and maybe a sentence or two teaser about some corresponding "inquiry" into the nature, options and opportunities of corresponding societal/jurisprudential/public policy quandaries and other challenges.
The fun part would be tagging or labeling which important themes each of the top series explores really well and then identifying in a "bottom up" (not dreary comprehensive long march through an entire corpus). I guess a spreadsheet or table would be best eventually but a simple markdown file with a #Header 1 title per key episode and ##Header 2 for the top issue and noting the ##Other Stuff like key scenes or situational themes running across scenes that provide necessary fact patterns to explicitly identify and analyze the most relevant roles/relationships, rights/responsibilities and rules/recourse applicable to all the parties (or other entities) "in play" for that episode.
- Survey of participants in 2017 MIT/IAP Computational Law course polling level of interest to join a "Black Mirror Legal Discussion Group".