Ian Kerr

Timeline

1. 1991–1995

   Philosophy and law at Western

   He earns a BSc in biology and an honours BA in philosophy at the University of Alberta, then an MA in philosophy at the University of Western Ontario. He enters Western Law in 1991 while completing a doctorate in philosophy, and he finishes his LLB and PhD in 1995.

2. 1996–1999

   Founding faculty at Western FIMS

   From 1996 to 1999, he is one of the first faculty members of Western's new Faculty of Information and Media Studies, where he helps develop the Media, Information & Technoculture program. He holds a joint appointment in law, information and media studies, and philosophy, and by 1999 he has published on computers as intelligent agents in electronic commerce.

3. 2000–2009

   Canada Research Chair at Ottawa

   He joins the University of Ottawa's Faculty of Law in 2000, where he is a founding member of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society, and he holds a Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law and Technology from 2001, at Tier 1 from 2009. He leads On the Identity Trail, a multi-million SSHRC partnership grant, and in April 2009, Oxford University Press releases Lessons from the Identity Trail, which he edits with Valerie Steeves and Carole Lucock, under a Creative Commons licence.

4. 2012–2016

   Co-founding We Robot

   In 2012, he launches the first We Robot conference on robotics law and policy with Michael Froomkin, Ryan Calo and Markus Wagner. He co-edits Robot Law with Calo and Froomkin, a 2016 Edward Elgar collection on liability, warfare, law enforcement and personhood in robotics and AI, and joins them at its launch during We Robot at the University of Miami in 2016.

5. 2017

   Senate testimony and a renewed chair

   In March 2017, he testifies before the Senate Liberals Open Caucus on the advantages and challenges of robotics and AI, using IBM's Watson in cancer diagnosis as an example. In November 2017, he renews his Canada Research Chair, bringing $1.5 million to the University of Ottawa to develop robotics and AI law and policy, a discipline his chair research helped start.

6. November 2017

   A letter against killer robots

   In November 2017, he leads an open letter with Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Rich Sutton and Doina Precup, backed by more than 200 Canadian researchers, that urges Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to support a ban on lethal autonomous weapons at UN meetings in Geneva. He says that "delegating life-or-death decisions to machines crosses a fundamental moral line."

7. 2019

   When AIs outperform doctors

   In 2019, he writes "When AIs Outperform Doctors" with Michael Froomkin and Joëlle Pineau, which argues that malpractice law could pressure doctors to delegate diagnosis to machine learning and makes the case for keeping physicians meaningfully involved. With Carys Craig, he drafts "The Death of the AI Author" in June 2019, arguing that claims of AI authorship rest on a category mistake about what an author is.

8. 2019

   Death and memorial awards

   He chairs CIFAR's AI & Society Advisory Council when he dies of cancer in August 2019, at age 54. In December 2019, Western Law alumni announce a student award in his memory. The University of Ottawa sets up the Ian R. Kerr Memorial Fund to support students, programming and research.