7 - What Will Robot Laws Look Like? Considering Code, AI and Human Laws

Summary

The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to the current discussion on what robot laws might look like once artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled robots become more widespread and integrated within society. The starting point of the discussion is Asimov’s three laws of robotics, and the realization that while Asimov’s laws are norms formulated in human language, the behavior of robots is fundamentally controlled by algorithms, that is, by code. Three conclusions can be drawn from this starting point in the discussion of what laws for robots might look like. One is that laws enacted for humans will be translated into laws for robots, which as discussed here, will be a difficult challenge for legal scholars. The second conclusion is that due to the norms which exist within society, the same rules will be simultaneously present in the natural language version of laws for humans and the code version of laws for robots. And the third conclusion is that the translation of the robots’ actions and outputs back into human language will also be a challenging process. In addition, the chapter also argues that the regulation of a robot’s behavior largely overlaps with the current discourse on providing explainable AI but with the added difficulty of understanding how explaining legal decisions differ from explaining the outputs of AI and AI-enabled robots in general.