The Human Control Over Autonomous Robotic Systems: What Ethical and Legal Lessons for Judicial Uses of AI?

Abstract

This contribution provides an overview of the normative problems posed by increasingly autonomous robotic systems, with the goal of drawing some lessons for the use of AI technologies in judicial proceedings, especially focusing on the shared control relationship between the human decision-maker (i.e. the judge) and the software syste m. It will zoom in, specifically, on two case studies: autonomous weapons systems and increasingly autonomous surgical robots. Their examinationwill enable us to highlight – respectively – the issue of acceptability of autonomous decision-making in ethically and legally sensitive domains, and the issue of human responsibility for harmful events caused by autonomous artificial agents. As will be shown, both have implications for the analysis of the ethical and legal issues raised by judicial applications of AI.