How the law will think about robots (and why you should care)

  • William D. Smart
  • , Neil M. Richards

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

As robots and robotic devices begin to enter our everyday lives in the coming years, legislation will be written to govern them. This legislation will typically not be written by robot-savvy technologists. It will be written and passed by lawyers and legal scholar, based on their understanding of what a robot is, and what it can do. How we talk to lawmakers about robots and robotics technologies will have a profound impact on what laws are passed and on the legal frameworks that emerge. In this paper, we argue that we must be careful about the metaphors we use to describe our systems when talking to lawmakers, and draw some parallels from the now well-established field of cyberlaw. We briefly discuss what it means to 'think like a lawyer', and show how using different metaphors for our systems could lead to radically different legislation being passed. Finally, we describe and discuss what we call the Android Fallacy; the pitfall of thinking about robots as anything other than (potentially very sophisticated) deterministic machines.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationARSO 2014 - Workshop Digest, IEEE International Workshop on Advance Robotics and its Social Impacts
EditorsHenny Admoni, Tamim Asfour, Cindy Bethel, David Bourne, Anca Dragan, David Feil-Seifer, Birgit Graf, Jeonghye Han, Nathan Kirchner, Masashi Konyo, Shinya Kotosaka, Sonya Kwak, Changchun Liu, Bruce MacDonald, Selma Sabanovic, Pericle Salvini, Sebastian Scherer, Masahiro Shiomi, Giancarlo Teti, Stephen Tully, Bram Vanderborght, Kazuyoshi Wada, Britta Wrede, Fumin Zhang
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages50-55
Number of pages6
EditionJanuary
ISBN (Electronic)9781479969685
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 23 2015
Event9th IEEE International Workshop on Advance Robotics and its Social Impacts, ARSO 2014 - Evanston, United States
Duration: Sep 11 2014Sep 13 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings of IEEE Workshop on Advanced Robotics and its Social Impacts, ARSO
NumberJanuary
Volume2015-January
ISSN (Print)2162-7568
ISSN (Electronic)2162-7576

Conference

Conference9th IEEE International Workshop on Advance Robotics and its Social Impacts, ARSO 2014
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityEvanston
Period09/11/1409/13/14

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