How to judge a'bot

摘要

When the autonomous cars in Isaac Asimov's 1953 short story "Sally" encourage a robotic bus to dole out some rough justice to an unscrupulous businessman, it appears that the bus has contravened Asimov's first law of robotics, which states that "a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm". Asimov's three laws are merely a bit of science fiction that is often taken to be a serious basis for robot governance. But robotic devices raise many thorny legal, ethical and regulatory questions. For instance, if an autonomous car is involved in an accident, who is to blame? And bionic technologies that enhance or become part of humans are trickier still. If an assistive exoskeleton is implicated in a death, who is at fault? If a brain-computer interface is used to communicate with someone in a vegetative state, are those messages legally binding?