AI versus robot: in search of a domain for the new European civil law
Paweł Księżak, Sylwia Wojtczak · Law Innovation and Technology · 2020
In 2017, the European Parliament issued a Resolution calling on the Commission to elaborate new solutions based on civil law that could respond to the rapid present-day development of robotics and AI. The Resolution, pushing for the preparation of new tort law focusing on robots, postulates that a new definition of robot be prepared. Responding to the Resolution, this paper consists in a legal-cognitive-linguistic analysis which draws three conclusions: firstly, that the definitional method is not the best approach to determining the scope of the regulation of robotics and AI; secondly, that the Resolution is incorrect in assuming that a new civil law solution should turn on differentiating between AI and robots and that robots should be treated as focal in determining the scope of the regulation; and, thirdly, that any new norms should be rooted in the concept of AI and not, as proposed by the Resolution, in the concept of robot.