The Deus Ex Machina of Humans: Right to Repair in the era of AI, Robotics, and Neural Implants

Written by SNAP member Zoe Filomeno

Image created with open source licensed images by Zoe Filomeno

I . Introduction

There is a particular betrayal reserved for the object that stops working due to its vintage status, phase-out, or hardware incompatibility. Throughout human history, tools have been developed and carefully crafted to withstand the test of time, wear, and tear. For example, we used to own tools such as tractors outright, and generations of farmers, mechanics, and consumer advocates fought to protect the plain expectation that came with ownership: the right to open it up, fix it, and prolong its utility. Emerging technologies have quietly revoked that arrangement, replacing it with software licenses and a repair manual with a locked terminal accessible only to a manufacturer. This post argues that the need to repair, once a matter of loose bolts and spare parts, has become a question of science policy: who, in an age of embedded code and implanted hardware, is permitted to know how to repair?

II. What is the Right to Repair?

The 1920s brought aesthetics, craftsmanship, and innovation to manufacturing. It also provided consumers with inferior products, as a culture of planned obsolescence permeated the ideological infrastructure of manufacturing. It’s an Americana staple, as culturally relevant as apple pie on the 4th of July. In response, the Right to Repair movement promised consumers the right to repair their lawfully purchased products by selecting a repair provider of their choice rather than a manufacturer-approved provider.

The importance of the Right to Repair has expanded beyond its origins in the automotive industry into agriculture and digital spaces. Notable cases include Aro Mfg. Co. v. Convertible Top Co. (1961), in which the Supreme Court ruled that replacing a worn-out part in a patented product constitutes a permissible repair instead of infringement into reconstruction. The ruling establishes the legal distinction between fixing what you own and the illegal cloning of a patented invention [1]. This was followed by the 1975 Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act (MMWA), which emerged during a period of dissatisfaction with deceptive and confusing business practices and remains relevant 50 years later. The act addresses disclosure standards and warranties that have created federal remedies within Title I Consumer Product Warranties: it provides that any supplier warranting a consumer product to a consumer in writing shall fully and conspicuously disclose in simple and readily understood language the terms and conditions of such warranty pursuant to any rules issued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)[6].

The first law in the spirit of consumers’ right to repair came from Massachusetts’s Right to Repair Bill H.4362 from 2012 [5]. It requires manufacturers to provide independent repair facilities and vehicle owners with the same diagnostic and repair information they give their own dealers, delivered through a standardized, non-proprietary interface, with a narrow margin for anti-theft security measures that lock vehicle engines known as immobilizer codes. Then history occurred because a nearly identical measure was already headed to the November 2012 ballot; voters passed their own version with 86% in favor even after the legislature acted, leaving the state of Massachusetts with two overlapping laws that took another year to reconcile. The bill set a precedent well beyond Massachusetts, as in 2014 a national trade group representing automakers and repairers signed a memorandum of understanding adopting the Massachusetts standard in all 50 states, making it the de facto national template [2,5].

The FTC’s May 2021 report, Nixing the Fix, examined how manufacturers restrict consumer repair through tactics such as hard-to-remove adhesives, limited spare parts, and withheld diagnostic software. The report concluded that there was scant evidence to support manufacturers’ justifications for these restrictions and that, ultimately, the harm falls disproportionately on communities of color and lower-income Americans [4]. These communities lose access to affordable repair options that would otherwise be within their reach. The FTC voted unanimously to commit more resources to enforcement actions under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act (1975) and Section 5 of the FTC Act, making the report a turning point for the movement rather than just a study.

In 2022, New York enacted the Nation’s first Digital Right to Repair law, the Digital Fair Repair Act. The law required manufacturers to provide independent repairers and owners with the same parts, tools, and repair information as authorized providers. The bill covers most digital products valued at $10 or more but excludes vehicles, medical devices, home appliances, and farm equipment. The final bill states that providers don’t have to share security bypass tools, can sell parts only as bundles rather than individually, and the law applies only to devices first sold in New York on or after July 1st, 2023, thus exempting everything currently on the market. Repair activist Louis Rossmann publicly criticized the carve-out as a sellout to lobbyists, even as others called the bill’s passage a milestone for the Right to Repair movement [7]. As of January 1st, 2026, Colorado’s most recent law (passed in 2024) is widely regarded as the broadest Right to Repair statute enacted, as it applies across most digital electronic devices [2,9].

III. The New Frontier: Emerging Technology Complications

Just as Right to Repair policies for mechanical tools are finally making their way into law, the toolbox itself is expanding. New technologies are introducing fresh challenges around ownership and repair, currently the definition of repair is in metamorphosis. Unlike traditional software, which maintains a fixed state unless deliberately changed, a machine learning model will degrade in production as real-world data drifts from what it was trained on [14]. This process requires ongoing monitoring and training to maintain the baseline output level. This dynamic is observed in assistive neurotechnology. Intracortical brain-machine interface decoders require daily recalibration to remain accurate because neural signal patterns are inherently non-stationary over time [19]. For the Right to Repair framework, which is built on parts and manuals, a new problem emerges: access to schematics and parts won’t matter if the model needs constant recalibration or retraining. This capability may remain within the bounds of proprietary infrastructure regardless of how open the hardware is.

Serialization, also known as parts pairing, is a method for linking individual replacement components to a specific device via embedded microchips. The method involves a genuine, functioning part that triggers an error message or exhibits reduced functionality unless authenticated via the manufacturer’s software. The practice began in the 2010’s agricultural industry and later crossed over towards consumer electronics, eventually spreading to other industries. For example, Apple Self Service Repair pairs parts with a device’s factory-assigned serial number [13,18].

Manufacturers have justified their repair restrictions on security grounds. In contrast, the argument for Right to Repair is that opening diagnostic access or parts-pairing systems to third parties exposes consumers to unvetted technicians and potential vulnerabilities. In 2021, the FTC reviewed evidence and concluded that manufacturers’ justifications for repair restrictions were largely unsupported [4]. Notably, security researchers report that authorized repair channels are not inherently safer, since insider risk exists regardless of who is credentialed to perform the repair.

Data repair infrastructure requires access to the device-generated data about its user. Device manufacturers like Apple, Google, and Samsung have introduced repair mode features to prevent technicians from accessing personal data during hardware service [12]. The stakes of repair restriction rise sharply once a device is functionally embedded in someone’s daily life. This category of devices includes power wheelchairs, prosthetics, hearing aids, and other assistive technologies [15,16]. Disability advocates state that devices function as extensions of the body itself, and treating them as subscription products subject to planned obsolescence carries more weight than, say, treating a laptop as a subscription product. Taken together, these emerging complications show that repair is no longer just a mechanical question, but one of access, security, and control.

IV. Philosophical and Ethical Frameworks

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) advocates for repair as one of software’s essential freedoms, along with the rights to run, study, modify, and redistribute a program, first codified by Richard Stallman in 1986 [20, 21, 23]. The FSF’s main argument is that if a device’s essential functions run on proprietary code, the owner cannot study or fully control what they purchase, regardless of the price paid. For example, farmers who own John Deere tractors worth thousands of dollars but can’t repair them because core operations are locked to the manufacturer [20]. A routine repair becomes a livelihood risk once the farmer is locked into manufacturer’s rates and timeframes.

Critics of the Right to Repair movement generally argue from two adjacent perspectives built on different premises. The utilitarian view holds that intellectual property protections exist to incentivize costly innovation [24]. This perspective suggests that if manufacturers are compelled to disclose trade secrets and technical blueprints, the financial incentives to invest in developing new technology could diminish, resulting in a net loss to overall societal benefit. The second argument is the freedom of contract proposed by libertarian-leaning critics [24]. Under the premise that manufacturers have the right to sell a product under whatever terms they choose, and consumers knowingly agree to an authorized repair-only arrangement at purchase, compelling the manufacturer to provide parts and/or documentation through Right to Repair would later violate that original agreement.

Presented side by side, these frameworks reveal the Right to Repair debate isn’t simply consumers vs. corporations. It’s at the heart of a philosophical disagreement about which freedom takes priority: consumers’ freedom to control what they have purchased, or the manufacturer’s freedom to protect their innovation. Manufacturers occupy the opposition, as they generally defend repair restrictions on IP protection, product safety liability, and revenue streams.

V. Stakeholders

The Right to Repair debate involves a range of stakeholders whose interests don’t always align, as some benefit from expanded repair access, while others face genuine costs or contested tradeoffs. Consumers and independent repair shops form the base of the Right to Repair movement, motivated primarily by cost savings and the practical experience of being unable to fix devices they own [8]. Parts pairings and restricted diagnostic access directly impact cost and push them toward earlier replacement cycles. Environmental advocates frame the issue through a sustainability lens, noting that electronics are the fastest-growing waste stream worldwide. In the U.S. alone, Americans purchased roughly 160 million new smartphones a year, a habit that requires 23.7 million tons of raw material to sustain. Farmers represent the most organized stakeholder group in the movement, having driven the original Massachusetts automotive precedent and continuing to drive telematics access as agricultural equipment becomes more software-dependent [10].

Manufacturers, by contrast, bear the direct costs of expanded repair access, from lost service revenue to the compliance burden of making parts, tools, and documentation available. Security researchers occupy a dual-use position. The same diagnostic and repair access in the name of protecting consumers from security vulnerabilities yet that same access is exactly what independent security researchers need to identify and close those vulnerabilities in the first place. In trying to guard against risk, restricting access can end up shielding manufacturers [25].

VI. Science Policy

Science policy scientists can bridge the gap in the Right to Repair debate by facilitating communication, as the question ultimately centers on technical expertise: whether a device class can be repaired safely by a non-authorized technician or whether manufacturers’ security claims hold up under scrutiny. Repair advocacy groups have pushed for the creation of formal standards within repairability. For instance, PIRG and iFixit have petitioned the FTC to develop and administer a Repair Score [13,29]. This program grades devices using a standardized reparability metric similar to existing energy-efficiency label standards.

The U.S currently operates a fragmented, state-by-state patchwork. New York, Massachusetts, California, Oregon, Colorado, and Minnesota all have distinct repair statutes with different scopes and exemptions, while federal efforts remain contested [9]. The EU’s upcoming directive takes a stronger approach than the U.S patchwork. The EU obligates manufacturers to repair specified product categories within a reasonable time at a reasonable price, extends the legal warranty guarantee by an extra year when a consumer chooses repair over replacement, and establishes a European online repair platform to connect consumers with registered repairers [27, 28]. This could create a useful comparative case for U.S. policymakers, as the EU has built repair obligations directly into consumer sales law rather than relying on voluntary industry memoranda.

VII. Conclusion

Repair is not a niche consumer complaint but a question about who controls the technical and legal terms of ownership as products become inseparable from their embedded software and data. As emerging technologies such as cloud-dependent hardware continue to evolve and become more widely adopted, does our overall concept of repair even hold up compared to previous purely mechanical devices? Perhaps the deeper measure of ownership was never whether we could fix what we bought, but whether we were ever permitted to know how it worked in the first place.

References:

Recognition:

Special thanks to SNAP Members who provided feedback on this article:

Shaurita D. Hutchins, a PhD candidate in Genetics, Genomics, and Bioinformatics advancing rare disease diagnostics and ethical genomics data stewardship; Amanda Finn, a Nutrition Sciences PhD candidate studying physiological and social determinants of insulin resistance in people with overweight/obesity; Anna Rader Groves, who received her PhD in Neuroscience from Georgia State University where she studied visual development in adolescence and related neuropsychiatric vulnerabilities. She now works in science communications and government relations; and Aislinn Gilmour, a PhD student studying environmental epidemiology at Dartmouth, with a focus on how environmental chemicals impact maternal and child health.