6 - The Reasonable Person in the Future

Summary

This chapter explores the reasonable person’s encounter with entities that possess artificial intelligence (AI). A discussion of this encounter is particularly important, since it has been argued that the advent of AI will lead to the demise of the reasonable person. The first section focuses on the ability of the reasonable person standard to assess the behaviour of machines or algorithms that act on behalf of humans and lack autonomous decision-making capacities. The second section considers proposals to replace the reasonable person standard with a reasonable robot or reasonable AI standard. The section also asks to what extent the reasonable person standard can be used to assess the behaviour of autonomous digital agents that act autonomously. The third section discusses contemporary proposals to subjectivise law through big data, in a manner that would dispense with the need for a reasonable person standard, since everyone would be measured with reference to their own personal standard.