Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2020
As robots and intangible autonomous systems increasingly interact with humans, we wonder who should be held accountable when things go wrong. This chapter examines the extra-contractual liability of users, keepers and operators for wrongs committed by autonomous systems. It explores how the concept of ‘wrong’ can be defined with respect to autonomous systems and what standard of care can reasonably be expected of them. The chapter also looks at existing accountability rules for things and people in various legal orders and explains how they can be applied to autonomous systems. From there, various approaches to a new liability regime are explored. Neither product liability nor the granting of a legal persona to robots is an adequate response to the current challenges. Rather, both the keeper and the operator of the autonomous system should be held strictly liable for any wrong committed, opening up the possibility of privileges being granted to the operators of machine-learning systems that learn from data provided by the system’s users.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.