Managing the Robopocalypse: The Case for a a Federal Robotics Commission

The U.S. Department of Transportation had a problem: Toyota customers were alleging that their vehicle had accelerated unexpectedly, causing death or injury. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found some mechanical problems that may have accounted for the accidents—specifically, a design flaw that enabled accelerator pedals to become trapped by floor mats—but other experts suspected a software issue was to blame. Like most contemporary vehicles, Toyotas rely on computers to control many elements of the car. Congress was worried enough at the prospect of glitches in millions of vehicles that it directed the DOT to look for electronic causes.

NHTSA lacked the expertise to disentangle the complex set of interactions between software and hardware “under the hood.” The agency struggled over what to do until it hit upon an idea: let’s ask NASA. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration builds semi-autonomous systems and sends them to other planets; it has deep expertise in complex software and hardware. Indeed, NASA was able to clear Toyota’s software in a February 2011 report.1 “We enlisted the best and brightest engineers to study Toyota’s electronics systems,” proudly stated U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, “and the verdict is in. There is no electronic-based cause for unintended high-speed acceleration in Toyotas."2

Under extraordinary circumstances, the best and brightest at NASA can take a break from repairing space stations or building Mars robots to take a look at the occasional Toyota. But this is not a sustainable strategy in the long run. Physical systems that sense, process, and act upon the world—robots, in other words3—are increasingly commonplace. Google, Tesla, and others contemplate widespread driverless cars using software far more complex than what runs in a 2010 sedan. Amazon would like to deliver packages to our homes using autonomous drones. Bill Gates predicts a robot in every home.4 By many accounts, robotics and artificial intelligence are poised to become the next transformative technology of our time.

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