might make better caregivers and companions for the elderly. However, there are many more reasons we don’t want computers to be intentionally or unintentionally fooling us. Hollywood provides lots of examples of the dangers awaiting us here. Such a law would, of course, cause problems in running any sort of Turing Test. However, I expect that the current discussion about replacements for the Turing Test will eventually move from tests for AI based on deception to tests that quantify explicit skills and intelligence. Some related legislation has been put into law for guns. In particular, former California Governor Schwarzenegger signed legislation in September 2004 that prohibits the public display of toy guns in California unless they are clear or painted a bright color to differentiate them from real firearms. The purpose of this law is to prevent police officers mistaking toy guns for real ones.

The second part of the law states that autonomous systems need to identify themselves at the start of any interaction with another agent. Note that this other agent might even be another AI. This is intentional. If you send your AI bot out to negotiate the purchase of a new car, you want the bot also to know whether it is dealing with a dealer bot or a person. You wouldn’t want the dealer bot to be able to pretend to be a human just because it was interacting with your bot. The second part of the law is designed to reduce the chance that autonomous systems are accidently mistaken for what they are not.

Consider four up-and-coming areas
where this law might have bite. First,
As any lover of Shakespeare knows,
there are many dangers awaiting us
when we try to disguise our identity.
What happens if the AI impersonates
someone we trust? Perhaps they will
be able to trick us to do their bidding.
What if we suppose they have human-
level capabilities but they can only act
at a sub-human level? Accidents might
quickly follow. What happens if we de-
velop a social attachment to the AI? Or
worse still, what if we fall in love with
them? There is a minefield of problems
awaiting us here.

This is not the first time in history that a technology has come along that might disrupt and endanger our lives. Concerned about the impact of motor vehicles on public safety, the U.K. parliament passed the Locomotive Act in 1865. This required a person to walk in front of any motorized vehicle with a red flag to signal the oncoming danger. Of course, public safety wasn’t the only motivation for this law as the railways profited from restricting motor vehicles in this way. Indeed, the law clearly restricted the use of motor vehicles to a greater extent than safety alone required. And this was a bad thing. Nevertheless, the sentiment was a good one: until society had adjusted to the arrival of a new technology, the public had a right to be forewarned of potential dangers.

Interestingly, this red flag law was withdrawn three decades later in 1896 when the speed limit was raised to 14mph (approximately 23kph). Coincidently, the first speeding offense, as well as the first British motoring fatality, the unlucky pedestrian Bridget Driscoll also occurred in that same year. And road accidents have quickly escalated from then on. By 1926, the first year for which records are available, there were 134,000 cases of serious injury, yet there were only 1,715,421 vehicles on the roads of Great Britain. That is one serious injury each year for every 13 vehicles on the road. And a century later, thousands still die on our roads every year.

Inspired by such historical prec-
edents, I propose that a law be enacted
to prevent AI systems from being mis-
taken for humans. In recognition of
Alan Turing’s seminal contributions to
this area, I am calling this the Turing
Red Flag law.
Turing Red Flag law: An autonomous
system should be designed so that it is
unlikely to be mistaken for anything
besides an autonomous system, and
should identify itself at the start of any
interaction with another agent.
Let me be clear. This is not the law
itself but a summary of its intent. Any
law will have to be much longer and
much more precise in its scope. Legal
experts as well as technologists will be
needed to draft such a law. The actual
wording will need to be carefully craft-
ed, and the terms properly defined.
It will, for instance, require a precise
definition of autonomous system. For
now, we will consider any system that
has some sort of freedom to act inde-
pendently. Think, for instance, self-
driving car. Though such a car does not
choose its end destination, it never-
theless does independently decide on
the actual way to reach that given end
destination. I would also expect that,
as is often the case in such matters, the
exact definitions will be left to the last
moment to leave bargaining room to
get any law into force.
There are two parts to this proposed
law. The first part of the law states that
an autonomous system should not be
designed to act in a way that it is likely
to be mistaken there is a human in the
loop. Of course, it is not impossible
to think of some situations where it
might be beneficial for an autonomous
system to be mistaken for something
other than an autonomous system.
An AI system pretending to be human
might, for example, create more engag-
ing interactive fiction. More controver-
sially, robots pretending to be human
There are many
reasons we don’t
want computers
to be intentionally
or unintentionally
fooling us.