Robotics, Compliance, and the Law

October 25, 2013, Robo Business, Santa Clara, CA—Garry Mathiason from Littler Mendelson addressed some of the issues associated with the glacial changes in laws and the ongoing robotics revolution. Companies need to address the hidden compliance requirements and legal changes for a robotized workplace.

The future is arriving fairly quickly. By 2025, half of the jobs in US industries will have robotics and advanced automation, about the same impact as the advent of the Internet. The robotics will have a global reach, and even China will have to consider the consequences of more automation.

The keys are the compute and memory in the cloud, AI for self learning, and the changes from command and rules to self learning will cause changes in labor laws. The addition of more and better sensors and the reduced cost of adding more compute power will make the robots more flexible and autonomous.

Already, autonomous cars are considered as likely within the next 5 years and will be available to the public. The big drivers will be a generational change, the younger drivers will adopt first, and the inclusion of more analytics and scenario planning into the user interface.

Some functions of AI and robotics are already in use. The automotive industry is starting to use a program called Sapphire for job interviews. The robot asks a set of 76 questions and uses the answers from the top 10 percent of workers as the basis for acceptance. The program can operate in any language and asks relevant follow up questions. The robot has vision capabilities to track eye movements and body language, and records the interview.

The robot injects some legal issues, most of which can be fixed. The difficult areas include HIPPA and ADA related questions and most state lie detector laws. The issues of data protection, copyrights, etc. all must be addressed. The fact that the responses are graded against the top 10 percent of workers may also invoke various discrimination aspects for some groups, like older workers, people with accents, some gender issues, etc.

As this type of robot moves into more businesses, other issues come up with health and safety. OSHA, FDA, etc. have some jurisdiction concerns and there may also be some tort liability issues. There may also be a requirement to use more robots to comply with the various laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Employment laws will have to address wage and hour requirements for telepresence workers. Who takes responsibility when work locations cross state lines? Unions are mostly against adding robots for the obvious reason that the machines will decrease their memberships. They are also wondering about how to add control over remote workers and including them in bargaining units.

Robots could be used as strike breakers and to move work to non-unionized workplaces. Workers will be displaced and will face technical unemployment. Past transitions to new technologies took place over a generation of workers, but the move to robots will take place in less than a decade, insufficient time to retrain people for the new jobs. This challenge will require the change of the definition of a person and worker.

Legislation is coming. The EU has a program to define new sets of laws by the beginning of next year. The recommendations will expect at least some part of a human relations group to be law experts. The HR group has be become involved in planning for the increase in contingent and virtual workers, and be engaged in the details of the robotics revolution. Other regions will follow.