Rule of Law in the Age of AI: Distributive Principles of Legal Liability for Multi-Species Societies

Project Outline

The UK and Japan appeal to similar models of subjectivity in categorizing legal liability. Rooted historically and philosophically in the figure of the human actor capable of exercising free will within a given environment, such a model of subjectivity ascribes legal liability to human agents imagined as autonomous and independent. However, recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) that augment the autonomy of artificial agents such as autonomous driving systems, social robots equipped with artificial emotional intelligence, and intelligent surgery or diagnosis assistant system challenge this traditional notion of agency while presenting serious practical problems for determining legal liability within networks of distributed human-machine agency. For example, if the accident occurs from cooperation between human and an intelligent machine, we do not know how to distribute legal liability based on the current legal theory. Although current legal theory assumes that the autonomous human agent should take the responsibility of the accident, but in the case of human-intelligent machine interaction, human subjectivity itself is influenced by the behavior of intelligent machine, according to the findings of cognitive psychology, of the critical theory of subjectivity, and of the anthropology of science and technology.
This lack of the transparent and clear distributive principle of legal liability may hamper the healthy development of the society where human dignity and technological innovation can travel together, because, as a matter of course, no one can trust the behavior and quality of the machine, that may cause corporal or lethal injury, without workable legal liability regime.
Faced with this challenge, that is caused and will be aggravated by the proliferation of AI in UK and Japan, we set the objective of our study as making the distributive principle of legal liability clear in the multi-agent society and proposing the relevant legal policy to establish the rule of law in the age of AI, that enables us to construct the "Najimi society" where human and intelligent machines can cohabit, with sensitivity to the cultural diversity of the formation of subjectivity.

Investigators

Participating and Cooperating Organizations