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The Road To Autonomy, Michelle Sellwood Dec 2017

The Road To Autonomy, Michelle Sellwood

San Diego Law Review

[T]his Comment discusses the background of AI and robotics, the technology behind the autonomous vehicle, and the evolution of products liability laws. Part III examines current regulations, the benefits of autonomous technology, and the need for a definitive liability framework. Part IV discusses why current tort liability laws will be ineffective in governing autonomous vehicle liability by examining the shift in liability from the driver to the owner and manufacturer. Part V proposes a short-term solution by attributing liability to the programmer, while software is still hard-coded. Finally, Part VI explores legal personhood, and proposes that the autonomous vehicle be …


Amoral Machines, Or: How Roboticists Can Learn To Stop Worrying And Love The Law, Bryan Casey Aug 2017

Amoral Machines, Or: How Roboticists Can Learn To Stop Worrying And Love The Law, Bryan Casey

Northwestern University Law Review

The media and academic dialogue surrounding high-stakes decisionmaking by robotics applications has been dominated by a focus on morality. But the tendency to do so while overlooking the role that legal incentives play in shaping the behavior of profit-maximizing firms risks marginalizing the field of robotics and rendering many of the deepest challenges facing today’s engineers utterly intractable. This Essay attempts to both halt this trend and offer a course correction. Invoking Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s canonical analogy of the “bad man . . . who cares nothing for . . . ethical rules,” it demonstrates why philosophical abstractions like …