Abstract
The aim of this book is to introduce laypersons to the complex set of principles, concepts, and ways of legal reasoning that govern the design, construction, supply and use of robotics technology today. In light of the classical distinction between legal plain and legal hard cases, attention is drawn to the cases where the disagreement among lawyers regards either the meaning of the terms framing the legal question, or the ways such terms are related to each other in legal reasoning, or the role of the principles that are at stake in the case. Paradoxically, the fact that a strong consensus still exists in the field of the laws of robots becomes clearer when the behaviour of robots falls within the loopholes of the system, provoking a new generation of hard cases.
HELENA: You mean you make them start to work as soon as they’re made?
DOMIN: Sorry. It’s more like working in the way a new piece of furniture works…
HELENA: How do you mean?
DOMIN: Much the same as going to school for a person. They learn to speak, write, and do arithmetic. They have a phenomenal memory. If one reads them a twenty-volume encyclopaedia, they could repeat it back to you word for word, but they never think up anything original. They’d make fine university professors.
Karel Ĉapek, Rossum’s Universal Robots, Introductory Scene
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Notes
- 1.
The connection between the law and such fields as politics, economy, and technology, is further examined in Chap. 5.
- 2.
As lawyers know, there is a savings provision pursuant to art. 7(2) of the Convention, which states: “This article shall not prejudice the trial and punishment of any person for any act or omission which, at the time when it was committed, was criminal according the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations.” The aim of this provision is to cover such exceptional cases as the Nuremberg trial against the Nazis.
- 3.
On the methodology of the “level of abstraction,” this author draws on Luciano Floridi’s work. See The Method of Levels of Abstraction (2008) and, more recently, the second volume of Floridi’s Principia Philosophiae Informationis, namely Information Ethics (2013). By varying the “interface,” the “set of observables” changes accordingly: more details on this method in Sect. 2.1.3.
- 4.
Nature, 22 September 2011, p. 399.
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Pagallo, U. (2013). Introduction. In: The Laws of Robots. Law, Governance and Technology Series, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6564-1_1
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