Walsh is less concerned with the specifics, the actual red flags of the Red Flag Law, than the basic principle of transparency. "Legal experts as well as technologists will be needed to draft such a law," he writes in the Communications of the ACM. "The actual wording will need to be carefully crafted, 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 independently."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.
In the end, it may be more so that the red flags (or their absence) offer warnings about the presence of fallible human drivers more than all-seeing overcautious machines.The three other examples Walsh digs into include personal assistants (Siri etc.), online poker, and computer-generated text (automated journalism, that is). Which are all pretty obvious, I think, but his ACM piece linked above is free-to-read."In many U.S. states, as well as many countries of the world including Australia, Canada, and Germany, you must be informed if your telephone conversation is about to be recorded," Walsh notes in conclusion. "Perhaps in the future it will be routine to hear, 'You are about to interact with an AI bot. If you do not wish to do so, please press 1 and a real person will come on the line shortly.'"I wouldn't count on that, but it's a nice idea.There are many situations where it could be important to know that another road vehicle is being driven autonomously. For example, when a light changes we can suppose that an autonomous vehicle approaching the light will indeed stop, and so save us from having to brake hard to avoid an accident. As a second example, if an autonomous car is driving in front of us in fog, we can suppose it can see a clear road ahead using its radar. For this reason, we do not have to leave a larger gap in case it has to brake suddenly. As a third example, at a four-way intersection, we can suppose an autonomous car will not aggressively pull out when it does not have right of way.