Sci-fi loves to portray robots as autonomous machines capable of making their own decisions and even displaying personalities. However, there is no way we can get rid of the thought that robots belong to us as our property and that they do not have the rights that humans usually have. But if a machine can think, make decisions and act of its own free will, if it can be harmed or made to be held accountable for its actions, should we stop treating it as property and start treating it as a person with rights?
What if the robot suddenly becomes fully conscious? Will he have the same rights as we have, and the same protection by the word of the law, or at least something similar?
These and other issues are already being discussed by the European Parliament's Legal Committee. Last year, he released a project paper and a proposal to create a set of civil law rules for robotics that regulate its production, application, autonomy and impact on society.
Of the proposed legal solutions, the most interesting was the proposal to create a legal status of "electronic persons" for the most complex robots.
Caution: personality
The report acknowledges that improvements in the autonomous and cognitive abilities of robots make them more than just tools, and conventional rules of responsibility like contractual and tort liability are not enough to work with them.
For example, the current EU directive on liability for damage caused by robots only covers foreseeable damage caused by manufacturing defects. In these cases, the manufacturer is responsible. However, when robots can learn and adapt from their environment in completely unpredictable ways, it will be more difficult for a manufacturer to anticipate problems that could cause harm.
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Concerns have also been raised about how robots should be considered sufficiently or insufficiently complex: as ordinary people, legal entities (for example, corporations), animals or objects. Instead of squeezing them into an existing category, it is proposed to create a new category of “electronic persons” as more appropriate.
The report does not advocate immediate legislative action, however. Instead, they suggest updating the legislation if robots become more complex and acquire behavioral subtleties. If this happens, one of the recommendations is to reduce the liability of the "creators" in proportion to the autonomy of the robot, and also include compulsory insurance.
But why go so far as to create a new category of "electronic faces"? After all, computers will not be close to human intelligence, if at all, soon.
Robots - or, more accurately, the software at their core - are getting more and more complex. Autonomous (or "emergent") machines are becoming more common. Controversy continues about the legal capabilities of autonomous devices. Can they perform surgery? Can a robotic surgeon be sued?
The robot is taught to "feel" pain
As long as the responsibility lies on the shoulders of the manufacturer, these are not particularly difficult problems. But what if the manufacturer cannot be easily identified, for example, in the case of using open source software? Who to sue if there are millions of software developers around the world?
Artificial intelligence is also starting to live up to its name. Alan Turing, the father of modern computing, proposed a test by passing which a computer could consider itself smart, if it manages to fool, deceive a person, impersonate a living being. The machines are already close to passing this test.
The list of robots' successes is quite long: the computer writes soundtracks to videos that are indistinguishable from those written by humans, bypasses the "captcha", writes in words and beats the best poker players in the world.
Ultimately, robots can match humans in cognitive abilities and even be overly human, for example, if they "feel" pain. If this progress continues, self-conscious robots will cease to be a product of fantasy.
The EU report is one of the first to address these issues, but other countries are also actively involved. Yue-Xuan Weng of Peking University writes that Japan and South Korea believe we will coexist with robots by 2030. The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has created a series of business and safety guidelines for next generation robots.
Electronic faces
If we do decide to give robots legal status, what will it be? If they behaved like people, we could treat them as legal entities, not objects, or place them somewhere in between. Subjects have rights and obligations, and this gives them a legal "personality". They don't have to be natural persons; a corporation is not, but is considered a legal entity. Legal entities, on the other hand, do not have rights and obligations, although they may have economic value.
The assignment of rights and obligations to an inanimate object or program independent of its creators may seem … strange. But we are already seeing how corporations create fictitious legal entities with their own rights and obligations.
Perhaps the approach to robots should be similar? If a robot (or program) is complex enough to meet certain requirements, it can be given corporation status. This will allow it to make money, pay taxes, own assets, or take legal action, regardless of its creators. The creators of the robot will be like the CEOs of corporations.
Robots will then be considered legal entities, but unlike corporations they will have physical bodies. An “electronic person”, thus, can be a combination of a subject and an object of law.
ILYA KHEL
