Tech at Beijing 2022: Smart beds, robots and their legal implications
Tech at Beijing 2022: Smart beds, robots and their legal implications
Some of the technologies that have been implemented in the winter Olympics have inherent legal implications, from sharing personal data to robotics
With the opening of the 2022 Beijing winter Olympics last Friday, it is advantageous to assess some of the technologies that have been implemented in this spectator-free pandemic event, especially considering their legal implications. Let’s start with the so-called smart beds that have been deposited in the Olympic villages, designed to collect data about each athlete’s vitals while sleeping. These are radically different than the ridiculed austere cardboard beds offered in the 2020-21 Tokyo Olympics in more than just comfort. According to at least one source, the beds are designed to “accurately capture the data of a person's body signature including heart rate and breathing to create a health report that can help coaches track their athletes' physical condition.”
With nearly 3,000 athletes at the Olympics, a data set containing all of the athletes’ vitals while sleeping would be especially valuable to researchers who aim to correlate an athlete’s abilities on the field with their previous night’s rest. However, it is unclear who, besides the athlete and their coach, will have access to this data. Moreover, it is unlikely that the collected data will be secured and encrypted.
One could imagine that beyond issues of rival athletes gaining access to this data for use on the court, or gamblers seeking to gain inside information, there are also enormous privacy concerns. In addition to obtaining data regarding the athletes’ vitals, the nature of the data collection means that your coaches, and everyone else snooping in, will know whether you even slept in your own bed last night.
Another prominent technology implemented at these Olympics is robotics. Reportedly, there are robots everywhere: They are performing as chefs, they are serving food, they are mixing drinks, they are disinfecting public areas, they are taking the temperature of passersby, and they are even providing directions that are designed to prevent excessive interaction between the athletes.
Robots were even part of the Olympic torch relay. Typically, the relay is a weeks-long passage of the Olympic torch from Olympia Greece to the host city via various athletes and personalities. Although robots have been part of the relay in prior years, China pushed the boundaries this year by including an over-the-top underwater robot handoff.
Robots may even outperform some of the Olympic athletes in their own sports, such as the recently unveiled skiing robot that reportedly can both act remotely or autonomously.
Coincidentally, a new film, set to come out in March 2022, combines both the creepiness of home appliances capturing your personal data, as well as the friendliness of the robots in China’s Olympic villages. After Yang, the second major motion picture directed by Korean-American filmmaker Kogonada, is based on the similarly titled story by Alexander Weinstein. In the film, the main character, Yang, is a futuristic technosapien, designed to help Jake and Kyra (played by Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner Smith) acclimate their adopted Chinese daughter Mika. Yang is a secondhand purchase who quickly becomes part of the family, but then breaks.
In seeking out an underground repairman to fix his robot, Jake finds out that Yang is secretly recording his family, extracting moments in time that Yang deems to be important, Ultimately, through determining what to record, the film suggests that the inanimate Yang was advanced enough to be able to express and feel humanlike emotions like love and remembrance.
While most reviewers will eventually focus on this aspect of the film and perhaps what it means with regard to legal personhood vis-à-vis robotics and artificial intelligence, there is an even more timely message. Because of the small print in Yang’s terms of service, Jake is forced to seek out underground help to repair his robot. This is a real issue today. Notably, after almost fifteen years of iPhones, Apple only just began allowing users to repair their own devices.
Perhaps there is nothing more representative of this fight for the right to repair than the demand by farmers, themselves eternal tinkerers, for the right to repair their tractors and other farming equipment. While not the only offender in the right to repair battle, John Deere is one of the most visible.
John Deere is a nearly two-hundred-year-old farming company that has been selling its iconic green tractors to generations of American farmers. The company is currently facing a federal antitrust lawsuit. The lawsuit argues that the company, which is on track for a record breaking $7.7 billion profit in 2021, has profited excessively off of monopolizing the tractor repair process through disincentivizing and even preventing farmers and other independent repair shops from repairing the tractors on their own.
Like many other consumer goods companies, John Deere claims that the farmers don’t own the software running their machines, they only license them, as such they have no legal rights to access or change that software. Apple recently made the same claim regarding the ownership of the iPhone operating system when it sued the Israeli cybersecurity company NSO, on behalf of its users.
At least 32 state legislatures in the United States have advanced right-to-repair laws. Nebraska, the fourth largest farming state in the nation, is reportedly the closest in actually passing such a law. In addition to the state efforts, federal lawmakers are also introducing bipartisan iterations of right to repair legislation, most recently this past week on Capitol Hill.
The goal of this legislation is to force manufacturers to share information, instructions and parts with consumers and unofficial repair shops. Henceforth, many in the automotive and consumer device industry made it exceedingly difficult for owners or their chosen unofficial repair shops to fix a broken product. And, in light of these difficulties, many farmers had turned to black market software fixes, as the risk of safety to themselves and those around them.
Whatever the final law, it will ostensibly have U.S. President Joe Biden’s support: who recently noted that "if you own a product, from a smartphone to a tractor, you don’t have the freedom to choose how or where to repair that item you purchased."
Unfortunately, one especially broken thing that won’t be fixed by this bill is the aforementioned Olympics. Costs have skyrocketed. China claims it will spend less than $4 billion for the current events, but in all likelihood, it has probably already spent 10 times that amount on new infrastructure for the games, not including the human and environmental costs.
While China is comparatively excessive in its cost overruns, they are far from unique in exceeding the promised budget. In addition to these consistent budgetary problems associated with hosting the Olympic games, many Olympic cities are also saddled with long-term debt, crumbling infrastructure and other enduring concerns years after the competitions.
These financial problems have been the reality for decades, and cities rarely gain financially from hosting these events, as such there has been a drastically reduced interest in hosting. These problems have been exacerbated by the increasing percentage of profits demanded by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). More than a decade ago, the IOC, an opaque private NGO, was found to be the least accountable NGO analyzed by Britain’s One World Trust.
The IOC has aimed to clean up its image, most recently with their Olympic Agenda 2020 which detailed recommendations to become more affordable, sustainable and flexible. For some, these efforts by the IOC are not enough, and they have suggested establishing permanent locations for all future winter and summer Olympics as an alternative to the bloated budgets required for new hosting cities. If that comes to fruition, perhaps in the off-season, Olympic villages will house these emerging smart Olympic robot populations, rather than stay vacant. That might be an interesting experiment to watch.
Prof. Dov Greenbaum is the director of the Zvi Meitar Institute for Legal Implications of Emerging Technologies at the Harry Radzyner Law School, at Reichman University
