EU plans to grant robots legal status could breach human rights law – this was the message from a group of 140 academics and experts in robotics and artificial intelligence, spanning 40 countries.
This is in response to a proposal from the European Parliament last year, which had suggested that a special legal status of ‘electronic persons’ could be granted to the more sophisticated, autonomous robots.
In an open letter, the experts warned the European Commission that the plans were ‘nonsensical and non-pragmatic’ and a potential breach of human rights.
To be clear, the Commission is not suggesting that robots be given rights to vote or own property – rather, the proposal is an attempt to deal with the issue of accountability: if an autonomous robot, with the capacity to learn through interaction, crushes a person in a factory or runs somebody over in the street, who is liable? The EU believes giving such robots ‘personhood’ may be the best solution. They could then be insured as independent entities should any accident occur.
However, this opens up the question as to whether individual owners or employees of corporations who employ these ‘robot persons’ could be unfairly protected from liability. This is one of the reasons that the experts – including Nathalie Nevejans from the CNRS Ethics Committee and Raja Chatila, former president of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society – have felt the need to intervene.
They wrote: “From a technical perspective, this statement offers many bias [sic] based on an overvaluation of the actual capabilities of even the most advanced robots, a superficial understanding of unpredictability and self-learning capacities and, a robot perception distorted by Science-Fiction and a few recent sensational press announcements.”
For some experts not involved in the open letter, the issues seems to be more that robots are not yet sophisticated enough to warrant ‘personhood’ status. But if, in the future, robots to evolve to the point that they become self-aware, conscious agents, this may be another matter altogether. It’s by no means a clear-cut issue and the argument is likely to go on.