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Criminal Liability And 'Smart' Environments, Mireille Hildebrandt

Mireille Hildebrandt

The spread of smart applications touches the foundations of the criminal law, notably causality, wrongfulness, and legal personhood. First, distributed multi-agent systems form hybrid networks that exhibit emergent behaviours that cannot be attributed to either one of the agents or explained in terms of an aggregation of actions. This makes it hard to determine which action actually caused the harm or the damage that would normally be addressed by the criminal law. Second, it is hard to imagine a smart environment or infrastructure itself becoming the culprit of a criminal charge, but at some point we may have to concede …