If Your Robot Commits Murder, Should You Go to Jail? | Big Think

If Your Robot Commits Murder, Should You Go to Jail?

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Just like automated vehicles, robots and advanced AI will require new sets of laws to define the extent of owner liability and accountability. Creating these laws will require an important ethical discussion: Who is at fault when a robot misbehaves? According to author Jerry Kaplan, there is a precedent for creating codes and consequences for robots that do not apply to others. Take, for example, the fact that criminal charges can be brought against corporations rather than the people operating beneath the corporate shell. Similarly, we can develop laws that would allow robots and their programming to stand trial.

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JERRY KAPLAN:

Jerry Kaplan is widely known in the computer industry as a serial entrepreneur, inventor, scientist, and author. He is currently a Fellow at The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. He also teaches Philosophy, Ethics, and Impact of Artificial Intelligence in the Computer Science Department, Stanford University.

Kaplan co-founded several ventures including Winster.com (social games); Onsale.com (online auctions); GO Corporation (tablet computers); and Teknowledge (expert systems). He wrote a best-selling non-fiction novel entitled “Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure”, selected by Business Week as one of the top ten business books of the year, and optioned to Sony Pictures, with translations available in Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese. His latest book is titled Humans Need Not Apply.

Kaplan co-invented numerous products including the Synergy (first all-digital keyboard instrument, used for the soundtrack of the movie TRON); Lotus Agenda (first personal Information manager); PenPoint (tablet operating system used in the first smartphone, AT&T's EO 440); the GO computer (first tablet computer) and Straight Talk (Symantec Corporation's first natural language query system). He is also co-inventor of the online auction (patents now owned by eBay) and is named on 12 U.S. patents.

He has published papers in refereed journals including Artificial Intelligence, Communications of the ACM, Computer Music Journal, The American Journal of Computational Linguistics, and ACM Transactions on Database Systems.

Kaplan was awarded the 1998 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Northern California; served on the Governor’s Electronic Commerce Advisory Council Member under Pete Wilson, Governor of California (1999); and received an Honorary Doctorate of Business Administration from California International Business University, San Diego, California (2004).

He has been profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Business Week, Red Herring, and Upside, and is a frequent public speaker.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Jerry Kaplan: There’s a whole other set of issues about how robots should be treated under the law. Now the obvious knee-jerk reaction is well you own a robot and you’re responsible for everything that it does. But as these devices become much more autonomous, it’s not at all clear that that’s really the right answer or a good answer. You go out and you buy a great new robot and you send it down the street to go pick you up a Frappuccino down at Starbucks and maybe it’s accidental, but it’s standing at the corner and it happens to bump some kid into traffic and a car runs the kid over. The police come and they’re going to come and arrest you for this action. Do you really feel that you’re as responsible as you would be if you had gone like this and pushed that kid into traffic? I would argue no you don’t. So we’re going to need new kinds of laws that deal with the consequences of well-intentioned autonomous actions that robots take. Now interestingly enough, there’s a number of historical precedents for this. You might say well how can you hold a robot responsible for its behavior? You really can actually and let me point out a couple of things.

The first is most people don’t realize it. Corporations can commit criminal acts independent of the people in the corporation. So in the Deepwater Horizon Gulf coast accident, as an example, BP oil was charged with criminal violations even though people in the corporation were not necessarily charged with those same criminal violations. And rightfully so. So how do we punish a corporation?...

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