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Eccentric Positionally As A Precondition For The Criminal Liability For Artificial Life Forms, Mireille Hildebrandt
Eccentric Positionally As A Precondition For The Criminal Liability For Artificial Life Forms, Mireille Hildebrandt
Mireille Hildebrandt
This contribution explores Plessner’s distinction between animal centricity and human eccentricity as “a difference that makes a difference” for the attribution of criminal liability to artificial life forms (ALFs). Building on the work of Steels and Bourgine & Varela on artificial life and Matura & Varela’s notion of autopoiesis I will reason that even if ALFs are autonomous in the sense even of having the capacity to rewrite their own program, this in itself is not enough to understand them as autonomous in the sense of instantiating an eccentric position that allows for reflection on their actions as their own …
Criminal Liability And 'Smart' Environments, Mireille Hildebrandt
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 …