New technologies in the field of artificial intelligence challenge the foundations of civil law

The legal status of the "machine endowed with artificial intelligence" is still uncertain. Over the past decades, scientists from different countries have proposed different options: to give robots the status of a legal entity, to invent a novel concept - an electronic person, some even dared to compare them with a person. Others spoke about the danger of giving robots any legal status. In April last year, the independent European Commission High- Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLEG) published a new version of the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence, along with a document defining artificial intelligence. This definition raises a lot of serious questions for lawyers and it is extremely difficult to answer them even using the existing theoretical instrumentarium. The immediate task of enforcing the AI HLEG requirements falls on the shoulders of lawyers. Such a task is not an easy one, taking into account the lack of established practice and appropriate legislative framework. It has to be created and implemented under the existing norms. It is almost impossible to do this without having a clear understanding of artificial intelligence and its legal status. The key point in the definition proposed by AI HLEG is that artificial intelligence "acts... by deciding...”. Such a wording jeopardizes the fundamental requirement for human governance and oversight. As we know from the theory of law, the life circumstances with which the law binds the emergence, change or termination of legal relations are called legal facts (events and actions). In the light of the above, there is a reasonable question about the place of actions taken at the discretion of artificial intelligence (i.e. based on the decisions it made) in the system of legal facts, until recently actions were the prerogative of people. Thus, we have "events" that do not objectively depend on the will and consciousness of people. Indeed, if even created and programmed by man the artificial intelligence system independently decides about its actions in each situation, then the will and consciousness of men have absolutely nothing to do with it. At this stage, we have to state that from a legal point of view, the independent actions of artificial intelligence systems formally fall under the signs of natural disasters. Anyway, it has become obvious that in addition to the transformation of labor markets, modernization of education systems and retraining of citizens (the things the European Union much concerned with), lawyers around the world will have to adapt the foundations of the theory of law to this changing at the velocity of sound “mad, insane, crazy world". Unless artificial intelligence does it for them.

Keywords

Authors

References