Skip to content
  • «
  • 1
  • »

The search returned 2 results.

Natural Law and its Implications for AI Governance journal article open-access

Yueh-Hsuan Weng, Takashi Izumo

Delphi - Interdisciplinary Review of Emerging Technologies, Volume 2 (2019), Issue 3, Page 122 - 128

With the recent emergences of AI technologies, our societies are facing regulatory challenges in terms of their design, manufacture, sale and use. In addition to the existing norms, many new ‘AI laws’ will be needed for early stage AI governance. However, when it comes to AI, there is a significant gap between hard laws and soft laws. Although we have witnessed the development of soft law from both public institutions and organisations like the EU and the IEEE in recent years, hard law has been less forthcoming. Answering the question of why this gap exists and whether or not ‘natural law’ can narrow is the chief purpose of this paper. To do so we will draw on two supplemental principles from the natural law tradition.


Digital Specific Property of Robots: journal article free

A Historical Suggestion from Roman Law

Takashi Izumo

Delphi - Interdisciplinary Review of Emerging Technologies, Volume 1 (2018), Issue 1, Page 14 - 19

Modern technology calls for the judicial integration of robots into our society as well as their functional integration. Some scholars and industrialists argue that robots might possess their own property and should pay tax; however, it seems premature to grant an electronic personhood to robots at their current technological level. Therefore, another legal institution is needed. With this in mind Pagallo suggests that the concept of ‘specific property’ (peculium), which was given to Roman slaves, could be applied to highly developed robots. He calls it digital peculium (DP). In this paper, I explain what peculium was in Roman law and compare it with some future regulations for an autonomous taxicab to clarify the similarity and differences between the Roman peculium and DP. Two merits of the introduction of DP are found in my study. First, a robot may have its own DP although it has no personhood. Second, substantive regulations, which were applied to Roman slaves for supporting their masters and creditors, may be reused without destroying the current legal system. In conclusion, it becomes clear that DP is useful as a chrysalis legal institution for supervising robots before they become autonomous in the truest sense of the word.

  • «
  • 1
  • »