Abstract
The starting point is the 2005 “World Robotics”-Report of the UN and the Economic Commission for Europe, mainly focusing on “robots of peace” such as environmental robots, surgical robots and edutainment robots. Here, responsibility and legal accountability for the design, construction, supply, and use of robots, are framed as a matter of risk and predictability in contractual obligations. In addition to artificial doctors and cognitive automata such as commercial software-agents, some riskier applications, e.g., ZI agents and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), stand for a further set of legal hard cases. The ability of robots to produce, through their own intentional acts, rights and obligations on behalf of humans, suggests distinguishing between robots as tools of human interaction and robots as strict agents in the legal system. However, as a new form of agent in the field of contracts, the increasingly autonomous behaviour of the robot entails the risk that individuals can be financially ruined by the activities of these machines. Whereas the traditional method of accident control via strict liability policies aims to cut back on the scale of the activity, new models of insurance and legal accountability for robots, e.g., the “digital peculium” of robo-traders, illustrate a sounder approach to the contract problem.
We scanned the skies with rainbow eyes and saw machines of every shape and size … The sun machine is coming down, and we’re gonna have a party.
David Bowie, Memory of a Free Festival
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Notes
- 1.
See the definition of the “probabilistic model code” proposed by the Joint Committee on Structural Safety (JCSS 2001: 60).
- 2.
Mracek’s appeal did not concern his previous claims on strict product liability, negligence and breach of warranty. In Unmanned Vehicles and US Product Liability Law (2012), Stephen S. Wu addresses further cases where “defendants were entitled to summary judgement because the plaintiffs failed to introduce evidence in opposition to summary judgement showing that the system was defective.” Among such cases, see Jones v. W + M Automation, 818 N.Y.S. 2d 396 (App. Div. 2006), appeal denied, 862 N.E. 2d 790 (N.Y. 2007); and Payne v. AAB Flexible Automation, 96–2248, 1997 WL 311586 (8th Cir. Jun. 9, 1997).
- 3.
For a more complete list, see Ŝtaerman and Trofimova (1975: 82).
- 4.
As mentioned in Sect. 3.5, we should grasp the unmanned vehicles as part of a more complex multi-agent system where such autonomous or semi-autonomous machines interact with maintenance and safety contractors, traffic operators or internet controllers, in order to avoid communication interferences, environment concerns, collisions, and the like. By considering that such machines will increasingly be connected to a networked repository on the internet that allows robots to share the information required for object recognition, navigation and task completion in the real world, some scholars refer to this type of robots as intelligent unmanned systems, unmanned aircraft or rotorcraft systems, and so forth. The aim of this section, however, is to stress the different ways UAVs, UUVs, and UGVs may affect current legal frameworks, rather than the systemic features of such network-centric applications.
- 5.
Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic, October 10, 2010, A1 of the New York edition.
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Pagallo, U. (2013). Contracts. In: The Laws of Robots. Law, Governance and Technology Series, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6564-1_4
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