TY - JOUR

T1 - Designing lawful machine behaviour: Roboticists' legal concerns

AU - Van Rompaey, Léonard

AU - Jønsson, Robert

AU - Elmose Jørgensen, Katrine

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

N2 - Regulatory requirements weighing on roboticists are becoming heavier, and at the same time, the activity of producing robots is theorized as creating new types of legal risks. Roboticists become responsible not only for compliance to a set of regulatory objectives, but they also become responsible for giving machines an ability to make decisions in uncertain environments. All of this gives roboticists’ legal literacy a newfound importance, and reveals the lack of data on that population from a socio-legal angle. While we have some knowledge of lawyers’ and policy makers’ concerns for robots, we do not know how roboticists understand their relationship to law and regulation, or the legal value they attribute to various engineering processes. This article offers a preliminary exploration of that population and of their legal concerns, through interviews of ten engineers from Danish robotics companies. The analysis shows that they perceive legal concerns as dependant and integrated into their concerns for safety, which are themselves inferior to functionality and economy concerns. The article further highlights differences in understanding and perception of various legal matters by our informants, and from our practitioner perspective. Hopefully, highlighting these differences will by itself help close the gap between the two professions.

AB - Regulatory requirements weighing on roboticists are becoming heavier, and at the same time, the activity of producing robots is theorized as creating new types of legal risks. Roboticists become responsible not only for compliance to a set of regulatory objectives, but they also become responsible for giving machines an ability to make decisions in uncertain environments. All of this gives roboticists’ legal literacy a newfound importance, and reveals the lack of data on that population from a socio-legal angle. While we have some knowledge of lawyers’ and policy makers’ concerns for robots, we do not know how roboticists understand their relationship to law and regulation, or the legal value they attribute to various engineering processes. This article offers a preliminary exploration of that population and of their legal concerns, through interviews of ten engineers from Danish robotics companies. The analysis shows that they perceive legal concerns as dependant and integrated into their concerns for safety, which are themselves inferior to functionality and economy concerns. The article further highlights differences in understanding and perception of various legal matters by our informants, and from our practitioner perspective. Hopefully, highlighting these differences will by itself help close the gap between the two professions.

KW - Faculty of Law

KW - artificial intelligence

KW - robotics

KW - engineering sociology

KW - robolaw

KW - safety

KW - chain of value

U2 - 10.1016/j.clsr.2022.105711

DO - 10.1016/j.clsr.2022.105711

M3 - Journal article

VL - 47

JO - Computer Law and Security Review

JF - Computer Law and Security Review

SN - 0267-3649

M1 - 105711

ER -