Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
the lifetime of the author, which is clearly inappropriate for a robot. It
would therefore seem that a change in the lawmight be needed to provide
proper protection for the creations of non-human creators, though as
pointed out by Karl Milde, in the U.S. copyright statute of 1909, “No
mention is made of what the writer has to be to qualify as an author
[therefore] to qualify as an author the writer has only to write.” [4]
The history of legal rights is spattered with examples of situations
that today we would consider ludicrous. In the Middle Ages it was not
uncommon to prosecute an animal such as a bull that had caused the
death of a human being, or even a swarm of locusts that had destroyed
crops. The accused animal was condemned by process of law and exe-
cuted just like a human criminal. This practice, which is absurd accord-
ing to our present-day views
1
, is attributable to the idea that it is not only
human beings that can have a “soul”, and so there is no basic difference
between these entities and human beings. And although modern laws
regulate only the behaviour of human beings and not those of animals,
plants or inanimate objects, this does not mean that our laws do not pre-
scribe how humans should behave towards animals, plants and inanimate
objects.
What is needed is a new branch of the law. Since the late 1960s
environmental law has been born and is growing. The environment and
its components, the air we breathe, our climate, the levels of noise we
experience, all lack many of the characteristics that are claimed to be
necessary as essential attributes for being human, yet even without these
attributes the environment is considered important enough to mankind
for us to want to protect it. In the same way robots will, before too
long, become so important to mankind that we will want to grant their
race and its individual members the benefits of legal protection, to give
them legal rights. When this new branch of law, robotic law, has come
into being, we will find lawyers, quite possibly robot lawyers as well,
defending the rights of intelligent, conscious robots from the loss of their
lives (for example by a total and irreversible loss of power), of their liberty
(freedom from slavery, including our drudge work), and protecting their
right to pursue happiness.
1
Although the practice became much less common after the Middle Ages, it was not in fact
until 1906 that the last recorded animal trial, with full legal status, took place in Europe. A man in
Switzerland was killed and robbed by a father and son with the fierce and effective cooperation of
their dog. All three murderers stood trial, but while both men received life sentences, the dog was
condemned to death.
