Robots are now associated with various aspects of our lives. These sophisticated machines have been increasingly used in different manufacturing industries and services sectors for decades. During this time, they have been a factor in causing significant harm to humans, prompting questions of liability. Industrial robots are presently regarded as products for liability purposes. In contrast, some commentators have proposed that robots be granted legal personality, with an overarching aim of exonerating the respective creators and users of these artefacts from (...) liability. This article is concerned mainly with industrial robots that exercise some degree of self-control as programmed, though the creation of fully autonomous robots is still a long way off. The proponents of the robot’s personality compare these machines generally with corporations, and sporadically with, inter alia, animals, and idols, in substantiating their arguments. This article discusses the attributes of legal personhood and the justifications for the separate personality of corporations and idols. It then demonstrates the reasons for refusal of an animal’s personality. It concludes that robots are ineligible to be persons, based on the requirements of personhood. (shrink)

Robots—in the form of apps, webbots, algorithms, house appliances, personal assistants, smart watches, and other systems—proliferate in the digital world, and increasingly perform a number of tasks more speedily and efficiently than humans can. This paper explores how in the future robots can be regulated when working alongside humans, focusing on issues such as robot taxation and legal liability.

Danaher (2016) has argued that increasing robotization can lead to retribution gaps: Situation in which the normative fact that nobody can be justly held responsible for a harmful outcome stands in conflict with our retributivist moral dispositions. In this paper, we report a cross-cultural empirical study based on Sparrow’s (2007) famous example of an autonomous weapon system committing a war crime, which was conducted with participants from the US, Japan and Germany. We find that (i) people manifest a considerable willingness (...) to hold autonomous systems morally responsible, (ii) partially exculpate human agents when interacting with such systems, and that more generally (iii) the possibility of normative responsibility gaps is indeed at odds with people’s pronounced retributivist inclinations. We discuss what these results mean for potential implications of the retribution gap and other positions in the responsibility gap literature. (shrink)

The notion of “responsibility gap” with artificial intelligence (AI) was originally introduced in the philosophical debate to indicate the concern that “learning automata” may make more difficult or impossible to attribute moral culpability to persons for untoward events. Building on literature in moral and legal philosophy, and ethics of technology, the paper proposes a broader and more comprehensive analysis of the responsibility gap. The responsibility gap, it is argued, is not one problem but a set of at least four interconnected (...) problems – gaps in culpability, moral and public accountability, active responsibility—caused by different sources, some technical, other organisational, legal, ethical, and societal. Responsibility gaps may also happen with non-learning systems. The paper clarifies which aspect of AI may cause which gap in which form of responsibility, and why each of these gaps matter. It proposes a critical review of partial and non-satisfactory attempts to address the responsibility gap: those which present it as a new and intractable problem (“fatalism”), those which dismiss it as a false problem (“deflationism”), and those which reduce it to only one of its dimensions or sources and/or present it as a problem that can be solved by simply introducing new technical and/or legal tools (“solutionism”). The paper also outlines a more comprehensive approach to address the responsibility gaps with AI in their entirety, based on the idea of designing socio-technical systems for “meaningful human control", that is systems aligned with the relevant human reasons and capacities. (shrink)

How should autonomous vehicles be programmed to behave in the event of an unavoidable accident in which the only choice open is one between causing different damages or losses to different objects or persons? This paper addresses this ethical question starting from the normative principles elaborated in the law to regulate difficult choices in other emergency scenarios. In particular, the paper offers a rational reconstruction of some major principles and norms embedded in the Anglo-American jurisprudence and case law on the (...) “doctrine of necessity”; and assesses which, if any, of these principles and norms can be utilized to find reasonable guidelines for solving the ethical issue of the regulation of the programming of autonomous vehicles in emergency situations. The paper covers the following topics: the distinction between “justification” and “excuse”, the legal prohibition of intentional killing outside self-defence, the incommensurability of goods, and the legal constrains to the use of lethal force set by normative positions: obligations, responsibility, rights, and authority. For each of these principles and constrains the possible application to the programming of autonomous vehicles is discussed. Based on the analysis, some practical suggestions are offered. (shrink)

Cyber warfare has changed the scenario of war from an empirical and a theoretical viewpoint. Cyber war is no longer based on physical violence only, but on military, political, economic and ideological strategies meant to exploit a state’s informational resources. This means that a deeper understanding of what cyber war is requires us to adopt an informational approach. This approach may enable us to account for the two-dimensional nature of cyber war, to revise the notion of violence on which war (...) is premised and to understand to what extent the traditional ideas of ‘just war’ may apply to the scenario of cyber warfare. This point is crucial, since it concerns whether a cyber war is meant to restore a broken international political and legal order or to participate in its construction. (shrink)

Criminal liability for acts committed by AI systems has recently become a hot legal topic. This paper includes three different contributions. The first contribution is an analysis of the extent to which an AI system can satisfy the requirements for criminal liability: accomplishing an actus reus, having the corresponding mens rea, possessing the cognitive capacities needed for responsibility. The second contribution is a discussion of criminal activity accomplished by an AI entity, with reference to a recent case involving an online (...) bot, the Random Darknet Shopper. This discussion will provide the context for the analysis of commonalities and differences between criminal activities by humans and by artificial systems. The third contribution concerns the evaluation of different ways of addressing criminal activities by AI systems in a regulatory perspective. (shrink)

No single moral theory can instruct us as to whether and to what extent we are confronted with legal loopholes, e.g. whether or not new legal rules should be added to the system in the criminal law field. This question on the primary rules of the law appears crucial for today’s debate on roboethics and still, goes beyond the expertise of robo-ethicists. On the other hand, attention should be drawn to the secondary rules of the law: The unpredictability of robotic (...) behaviour and the lack of data on the probability of events, their consequences and costs, make hard to determine the levels of risk and hence, the amount of insurance premiums and other mechanisms on which new forms of accountability for the behaviour of robots may hinge. By following Japanese thinking, the aim is to show why legally de-regulated, or special, zones for robotics, i.e. the secondary rules of the system, pave the way to understand what kind of primary rules we may want for our robots. (shrink)

The paper examines the realignment of the legal sources in an information society, by considering first of all the differences with the previous system of sources, dubbed as the “Westphalian model”. The current system is tripartite, rather than bipartite, for the sources of transnational law should be added to the traditional dichotomy between national and international law. In addition, the system is dualistic, rather than monistic, because the tools of legal constructivism, such as codes or statutes, have to be complemented (...) with the rules of customary law and contracts. In light of the canonical version of the law as a set of commands enforced through the threat of physical sanctions, however, two further novelties must be stressed, namely the soft law-tools of governance as a source of the system and the aim to embed normative constraints into technology, in order to enforce the law through the use of filtering systems, self-enforcing technologies, etc. This latter approach impacts on functions and requirements of the system, by transferring the normative side of the law from the traditional “ought to” of legal commands to what actually is on the basis of automatic techniques, thus affecting the very notion of source. The overall aim of the paper is to show that rearrangements of the legal sources are intertwined with redistributions of power and hence, a normative standpoint is needed, so as to determine whether scholars can obtain the solution that best justifies the integrity of the law before its hard cases, or the answer is a reasonable compromise between many conflicting interests. (shrink)

The paper deals with the governance of Unmanned Aircraft Systems in European law. Three different kinds of balance have been struck between multiple regulatory systems, in accordance with the sector of the governance of UAS which is taken into account. The first model regards the field of civil aviation law and its European Union ’s regulation: the model looks like a traditional mix of top-down regulation and soft law. The second model concerns the EU general data protection law, the GDPR, (...) which has set up a co-regulatory framework summed up with the principle of accountability also, but not only, in the field of drones. The third model of governance has been adopted by the EU through methods of legal experimentation and coordination mechanisms for UAS. The overall aim of the paper is to elucidate the ways in which such three models interact, insisting on differences and similarities with other technologies, and further legal systems. (shrink)

The use of cyber force can be as severe and disruptive as traditional armed attacks are. Cyber attacks may neither provoke physical injuries nor cause property damages and still, they can affect essential functions of today’s societies, such as governmental services, business processes or communication systems that progressively depend on information as a vital resource. Whereas several scholars claim that an international treaty, much as new forms of international cooperation, are necessary, a further challenge should be stressed: authors of cyber (...) attacks can be non-state actors, and identifying the party responsible for such a use of force, whether non-state actors or national sovereign states, is often impossible. Accordingly, several programmes on online security and national defence have been developed by sovereign states to tackle this menace and yet, the endurance of Western democracies and their aim to protect basic rights have already been tested by such programmes over the past years. The new scenarios of cyber force do not only concern the field of international law, since they may represent the main threat in the fields of national and constitutional law as well. (shrink)

The rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics will have a profound impact on society as they will interfere with the people and their interactions. Intelligent autonomous robots, independent if they are humanoid/anthropomorphic or not, will have a physical presence, make autonomous decisions, and interact with all stakeholders in the society, in yet unforeseen manners. The symbiosis with such sophisticated robots may lead to a fundamental civilizational shift, with far-reaching effects as philosophical, legal, and societal questions on consciousness, citizenship, rights, (...) and legal entity of robots are raised. The aim of this work is to understand the broad scope of potential issues pertaining to law and society through the investigation of the interplay of law, robots, and society via different angles such as law, social, economic, gender, and ethical perspectives. The results make it evident that in an era of symbiosis with intelligent autonomous robots, the law systems, as well as society, are not prepared for their prevalence. Therefore, it is now the time to start a multi-disciplinary stakeholder discussion and derive the necessary policies, frameworks, and roadmaps for the most eminent issues. (shrink)

The notion of validity fulfils a crucial role in legal theory. In the emerging Web 3.0, Semantic Web languages, legal ontologies, and normative multi-agent systems are designed to cover new regulatory needs. Conceptual models for complex regulatory systems shape the characteristic features of rules, norms, and principles in different ways. This article outlines one of such multilayered governance models, designed for the CAPER platform, and offers a definition of Semantic Web Regulatory Models . It distinguishes between normative-SWRM and institutional-SWRM. It (...) also compares existing principles in privacy by design, linked open data , legal information institutes , and online dispute resolution . The article concludes by proposing the notion of Relational Law to summarize the ethical dimension of SWRM. Ethics are the only regulatory way to constitute a global space, out of the jurisdictional public domain set by national, international, or transnational law, and opposed to the private one. (shrink)

This paper argues against the moral Turing test as a framework for evaluating the moral performance of autonomous systems. Though the term has been carefully introduced, considered, and cautioned about in previous discussions :251–261, 2000; Allen and Wallach 2009), it has lingered on as a touchstone for developing computational approaches to moral reasoning :98–109, 2015). While these efforts have not led to the detailed development of an MTT, they nonetheless retain the idea to discuss what kinds of action and reasoning (...) should be demanded of autonomous systems. We explore the flawed basis of an MTT in imitation, even one based on scenarios of morally accountable actions. MTT-based evaluations are vulnerable to deception, inadequate reasoning, and inferior moral performance vis a vis a system’s capabilities. We propose verification—which demands the design of transparent, accountable processes of reasoning that reliably prefigure the performance of autonomous systems—serves as a superior framework for both designer and system alike. As autonomous social robots in particular take on an increasing range of critical roles within society, we conclude that verification offers an essential, albeit challenging, moral measure of their design and performance. (shrink)