Three Laws Blog: Law and Artificial Intelligence

Stix on The Ghost of AI Governance Past, Present and Future: AI Governance in the EU @charlotte_stix

Charlotte Stix, Eindhoven University of Technology; University of Cambridge, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, has published The Ghost of AI Governance Past, Present and Future: AI Governance in the European Union. Here is the abstract.

The received wisdom is that artificial intelligence (AI) is a competition between the US and China. In this chapter, the author will examine how the European Union (EU) fits into that mix and what it can offer as a ‘third way’ to govern AI. The chapter presents this by exploring the past, present and future of AI governance in the EU. Section 1 serves to explore and evidence the EU’s coherent and comprehensive approach to AI governance. In short, the EU ensures and encourages ethical, trustworthy and reliable technological development. This will cover a range of key documents and policy tools that lead to the most crucial effort of the EU to date: to regulate AI. Section 2 maps the EU’s drive towards digital sovereignty through the lens of regulation and infrastructure. This covers topics such as the trustworthiness of AI systems, cloud, compute and foreign direct investment. In Section 3, the chapter concludes by offering several considerations to achieve good AI governance in the EU.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Burri on the Free Movement of Algorithms: Artificially Intelligent Persons Conquer the EU's Internal Market @HSGStGallen ‏@ElgarPublishing

Thomas Burri, University of St. Gallen, is publishing Free Movement of Algorithms: Artificially Intelligent Persons Conquer the European Union's Internal Market in Research Handbook on the Law of Artificial Intelligence (Woodrow Barfield and Ugo Pagallo, eds., Edward Elgar, 2017/18) (forthcoming).

This paper explores how artificial intelligence can do business in the European Union’s internal market. Basically, once artificial intelligence has been granted legal personality pursuant to the law of a Union member state, it benefits from free movement of algorithms. It can invoke the freedom of establishment laid down in the European Union’s founding treaties to have its personality recognized in other member states. While e-personhood, which the European Parliament recently put forward, runs into serious doubts, mutual recognition of personhood is mandatory for artificially intelligent companies established by means of a mechanism first proposed by U.S. scholar Shawn Bayern. The member states are precluded from adopting measures against artificially intelligent persons benefitting from free movement, save in narrowly circumscribed circumstances of justification. The measure of control natural persons exercise over artificially intelligent persons turns out to be a key variable in this regard.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Blockx on Antitrust in Digital Markets in the EU: Policing Price Bots

Jan Blockx, University of Antwerp, Faculty of Law, has published Antitrust in Digital Markets in the EU: Policing Price Bots, delivered at the Radboud Economic Law Conference, June 9, 2017. Here is the abstract.

A number of authors have in recent years stated that current antitrust rules may not be able to police supra-competitive price levels (or indeed other undesirable market outcomes) which may result from the use of price robots. This paper discusses what tools are available in EU antitrust law to tackle collusion by price bots, based on the existing legislation, the case law of the European courts and the practice of the European Commission. It argues that unlawful collusion can result from the disclosure of sensitive information from one undertaking to another, even the absence of anticompetitive intent. On this basis, even self-learning pricing algorithms could be caught by the prohibition of Article 101 TFEU. Furthermore, undertakings can be liable for the actions of the (self-learning) algorithms they create or use. Undertakings have a positive obligation to ensure compliance with the EU antitrust rules and cannot plead ignorance of what their employees or price bots are doing. And even if there would be circumstances where undertakings could not be found to have been negligent in how they supervise their employees and price bots, the toolbox of the European Commission is large enough to stop practices for which no undertaking is to blame.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Caytas on European Perspectives on an Emergent Law of Robotics @JoannaDaytas

Joanna Diane Caytas, Columbia University, has published European Perspectives on an Emergent Law of Robotics in the Columbia Journal of European Law: Preliminatry Reference (April 4, 2017). Here is the abstract.

As artificial intelligence and learning-enabled automation turn into a staple not only in the workplace but across all areas of life, legislation and jurisprudence relating to that immensely transformative phenomenon largely remained stuck in models and paradigms of the analog world. But analogies to conventional mechanical machines and related concepts of product liability, personal injury, intellectual property, and a wide array of rights and responsibilities can be stretched only so far. Beyond all that lays what looks today like science fiction – and yet it may still lag behind the dynamic of aggressive innovation that, within a few short years, has laid the groundwork for almost fully automated warfare, police work, automotive transport, and the replacement of increasingly numerous and comprehensive functions even in highly specialized and regulated professions. While parts of the EU proposal to endow robots with “quasi-human” individual rights such as an “electronic personhood” sound like misguided science fiction today, along with other contentious propositions like a mandatory “kill switch,” they are but mosaic stones in what promises to be an enduring human struggle to escape loss of control by way of a fast-approaching singularity, to avoid social detriment through inequality-reducing robot taxation and, generally, to avoid technophobe backlash in the face of never before encountered disruption of an anthropocentric world view and life form. While none of today’s proposals should be viewed literally, much less as immutable, enduring frameworks, they do deserve to be taken seriously, as initial keystones in an edifice ambitious enough to control the boundaries of transhuman ingenuity as it surpasses both capabilities and direct operational and ethical control of its creators.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.