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The Laws of Robots

Part of the book series: Law, Governance and Technology Series ((LGTS,volume 10))

Abstract

Robots are affecting tenets of current legal systems in a twofold way. First, robotic technology is inducing a number of critical legal loopholes, which are proper of the criminal law field, e.g., the employment of autonomous robot soldiers in battle. Significantly, Christof Heyns, Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, urged in his 2010 Report to the UN General Assembly that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon convene a group of experts in order to address “the fundamental question of whether lethal force should ever be permitted to be fully automated.” On the other hand, we have to determine whether the behaviour of robots falls within the loopholes of the system, necessitating the intervention of lawmakers at both national and international levels, as they did in the early 1990s when establishing a new class of computer crimes. Besides the immunity of military and political authorities for the use of robots in battle, a second class of hard cases concerns how the growing autonomy of robots affects key notions of the system, such as reasonability, predictability, or foreseeability, on which an individual’s fault depends. This is the class of hard cases that criminal lawyers share with experts in tort law and contracts.

If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be the punishment as well as the prison.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Scientific American, July 2010, p. 39.

  2. 2.

    “Flight of the Drones,” 8 October 2011, p. 32.

  3. 3.

    See above in Sect. 2.1.

  4. 4.

    See the special edition of the Journal of Law, Information & Science (21(2)), on “Laws unmanned,” with the papers of Philip Alston, Tim McCormack & Meredith Hagger, Rob McLaughlin, Mary Ellen O’Connell, Noel Sharkey, Markus Wagner, and the aforementioned work of Armin Krishnan.

  5. 5.

    Top Cop Predicts Robot Crimewave, retrieved at http://www.futurecrimes.com/article/top-cop-predicts-robot-crimewave-2/on 31 May 2012.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Torino Law School, University of Torino, Torino, Italy

    Ugo Pagallo

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  1. Ugo Pagallo
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Pagallo, U. (2013). Crimes. In: The Laws of Robots. Law, Governance and Technology Series, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6564-1_3

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