Liability for Present and Future Robotics Technology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor N. White ◽  
Seth D. Baum
Keyword(s):  
Significant Challenge ◽  
Legal Personhood ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Law ◽  
Global Catastrophe ◽  
Near Future ◽  
As If

Advances in robotics technology are causing major changes in manufacturing, transportation, medicine, and numerous other sectors. While many of these changes are beneficial, some will inevitably lead to harm. Who should be liable when a robot causes harm? This chapter addresses how the law can and should account for robot liability, including robots that exist today and that could potentially be built in the future. Current and near-future robots pose no significant challenge: existing law or minor variations therein can readily handle them. A greater challenge will arise if it becomes possible to build robots that merit legal personhood and thus can be held liable, as well as if future robots can cause major global catastrophe.

scholarly journals Repositioning People in Creative Futures: A Method to Create Sound Advice with Exploratory Scenarios

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-38
Author(s):  
Guillermo Velasco ◽  
◽  
Rafael Popper ◽  
Ian Miles ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Policy Recommendations ◽  
Future Scenarios ◽  
Policy Decisions ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Near Future ◽  
As If

Foresight scenarios are not only useful presentational devices to show that many aspects of the future are open. Scenarios are means for generating advice that helps policymakers initiate actions in the present or near future that will be of long-term significance. Despite the influence that such advice may have on policy decisions, the Foresight literature has paid very little attention to the creation of policy recommendations. Though reports of scenario exercises frequently conclude with lists of recommendations that follow from the study, there is very little explication of the process whereby advice is elicited from the examination of these future scenarios. This paper addresses this gap, examining how the generation of recommendations is related to the development of scenarios within multiple future repositioning workshop settings. It focuses on the fluency and originality of these recommendations, and how this is influenced by repositioning participants in highly transformational scenarios. Repositioning is the process whereby participants are invited to imagine themselves playing roles in hypothetical future contexts, and on that basis to make decisions or devise strategies as if they actually were immersed in these circumstances. The method proposed and the findings of the case study have implications for why and how this future repositioning approach can be incorporated as a ‘key feature’ in the design of Foresight activities. The aim is also to raise awareness of the need for more exploration of Foresight recommendation methodology.

Technological revolution, democratic recession, and climate change: The limits of law in a changing world

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 334-369
Author(s):  
Luís Roberto Barroso
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Ethical Dilemmas ◽  
A Priori ◽  
The Political ◽  
Technological Revolution ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Law ◽  
Near Future ◽  
Changing World

Abstract Law is a universal institution that has pretensions of being ubiquitous and complete. However, in a complex, plural and volatile world, its limits and possibilities are shaken by the speed, depth and extent of ongoing transformations, its resulting ethical dilemmas, and the difficulties of forming consensus in the political universe. This article provides a reflection on how the law has attempted to deal with some of the main afflictions of our time, facing demands that include the needs to (i) keep the technological revolution on an ethical and humanitarian track, (ii) avoid democracy being perverted by populist and authoritarian adventures, and (iii) prevent solutions to climate change from coming when it is too late. At a time when even the near future has become unpredictable, the law cannot provide a priori solutions to multiplying problems and anxieties. When this happens, we must set clear goals for the future of humanity, basing them on the essential and perennial values that have followed us since antiquity.

On behalf of Pascal: A Reply to Le Poidevin

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 189
Author(s):  
Sebastian Gäb
Keyword(s):  
Christian Spirituality ◽  
Potential Candidate ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Real Possibility ◽  
Doctrine Of God ◽  
The Future ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
As If

When we were on the subway back from his lecture, I said to Robin: “I’m not sure there actually are any religious fictionalists.” We keep talking about them in papers and lectures, acting as if fictionalism in religion is a real possibility, but to be honest, I haven’t been able to spot one in the wild so far. The only potential candidate who comes to mind is Don Cupitt, who wrote things like: “I still pray and love God, even though I fully acknowledge that no God actually exists.”[1] Perhaps this is as fictionalist as it gets. But then again, Cupitt never explicitly declared himself a fictionalist (at least to my knowledge). Moreover, on other occasions he sounds more like an expressivist than a fictionalist, e.g. when he says: “The Christian doctrine of God just is Christian spirituality in coded form.”[2] So, if there are any actual fictionalists out there, please step forward.[1] Don Cupitt, After God: The Future of Religion (Basic Books, 1997), 85.[2] Don Cupitt, Taking leave of God (SCM Press, 1980), 14.

scholarly journals Some Remarks on the Report by the Commissioners appointed to investigate into the Recent Changes in the Relative Values of the Precious Metals

1891 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 190-204
Author(s):  
A. Gillies Smith
Keyword(s):  
Precious Metals ◽  
Daily Work ◽  
The Future ◽  
Value Of Money ◽  
As If

Some years have now elapsed since I had the honour of addressing you from this chair. In the paper which I then read to you I urged on our younger members the necessity of studying finance, and especially of endeavouring to form a just estimate of the value of money, and of the rate of interest which will obtain in the future, so far as that future forms an element in our calculations. Without this knowledge we shall build with insufficient materials, and in the absence of its thoughtful application to our daily work, and to our periodical investigations and valuations, we shall rear a fabric which, although it may last during our lives, and look to all appearance as if it were carefully and substantially built, will certainly, before its time, show symptoms of decay, and finally fall about the ears of too confiding policy-holders.

The Trial of the Future: Challenge to the Law

1963 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 393
Author(s):  
Walter V. Schaefer ◽  
Bernard Botein ◽  
Murray Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Future Challenge ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Law

What is an Ecodisaster?

1977 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Cloudsley-Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Developed Countries ◽  
Standard Of Living ◽  
World Population ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Pests And Diseases ◽  
The Past ◽  
Environmental Deterioration ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Catastrophe ◽  
Near Future

The term ‘ecodisaster’ may be defined as ‘a global catastrophe of the human species’. Any ecodisasters occurring in the near future will, almost certainly, be caused, directly or indirectly, by the present overpopulation of the world, accompanied by unwise and irresponsible disregard of environmental deterioration.The suggestion is made here that Man's first and, it is to be hoped, last, ecodisaster may already have begun. Although not dramatic, it is taking the form of a steady decline in the standard of living nearly everywhere, coupled with massive pollution, and widespread malnutrition in the under-developed countries of the world. It will persist until world population eventually becomes adjusted to environmental resources.It is ironical that control of the pests and diseases which have inflicted so much misery on mankind in the past, should have helped to engender the present population explosion with all the hunger and privation that accompany it in the under-developed regions of the world.

scholarly journals Love in the time of Covid-19: a case-study of the complex laws governing weddings

Legal Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Rebecca Probert ◽  
Stephanie Pywell
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Marriage Law ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
General Law ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fit For Purpose ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Impact

Abstract During 2020, weddings were profoundly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. During periods of lockdown few weddings could take place, and even afterwards restrictions on how they could be celebrated remained. To investigate the impact of such restrictions, we carried out a survey of those whose plans to marry in England and Wales had been affected by Covid-19. The 1,449 responses we received illustrated that the ease and speed with which couples had been able to marry, and sometimes whether they had been able to marry at all, had depended not merely on the national restrictions in place but on their chosen route into marriage. This highlights the complexity and antiquity of marriage law and reinforces the need for reform. The restrictions on weddings taking place also revealed the extent to which couples valued getting married as opposed to having a wedding. Understanding both the social and the legal dimension of weddings is important in informing recommendations as to how the law should be changed in the future, not merely to deal with similar crises but also to ensure that the general law is fit for purpose in the twenty-first century.

The Conseil Constitutionnel and Judicial Review

1991 ◽  
Vol 12 (x) ◽  
pp. 61-82
Author(s):  
Richard Cicchillo
Keyword(s):  
Judicial Review ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
Similar System ◽  
Modern France ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Law ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
The Revolution

For Americans, long accustomed to judicial review of the law, the traditional absence of a similar system of constitutional control in France comes as a surprise. Closer examination however, reveals that the French politico-historico-judicial tradition inherited from the Ancien Régime and the Revolution of 1789 is deeply opposed to the development of "government by the judges." Why did the Revolution react against the judiciary? How has the idea of constitutional control evolved in modern France? What are the possible sources of legitimacy for an institution (the Conseil constitutionnel) and a concept (judicial review) cut off from the sanction of tradition? What is the future of the Conseil?

CAN JULIEN D’HUY’S COSMOGONIES SAVE US FROM YUVAL NOAH HARARI?

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-34
Author(s):  
Prof. Ph.D. Jacques COULARDEAU ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Circuit ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
Intelligent Machines ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Tv Shows ◽  
Present World ◽  
As If

Over the last two decades, we seem to have been confronted with a tremendous number of books, films, TV shows, or series that deal with the past and the present, not to mention the future, as if it were all out of time, timeless, even when it is history. We have to consider our present world as the continuation and the result of the long evolution our species has gone through since we emerged from our ancestors 300,000 years ago. Julien d’Huy is a mythologist who tries to capture the phylogeny of myths, and popular or folkloric stories that have deep roots in our past and have been produced, changed and refined over many millennia. Can he answer the question about how we have become what we are by studying the products of our past and present imagination? But confronted to the prediction of Y.N. Harari that our species will simply disappear as soon as the intelligent machines we are inventing and producing take over our bodies, brains, and minds in just a few decades, Julien d’Huy sure sounds like the antidote because at every turn in our long history we have been able, collectively, to seize the day, and evolve into a new stage in our life, both biological and mental, not to mention spirituality. Let’s enter Julien d’Huy’s book and find out the power and the energy that will enable us to short-circuit and avoid Yuval’s nightmare.

Rereading Rape in the Critical Canon

differences ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-160
Author(s):  
Erin A. Spampinato
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Rape Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
Criminal Conduct ◽  
Forms Of Violence ◽  
As If ◽  
Physical Outcomes

This essay identifies what the author terms “adjudicative reading,” a tendency in literary criticism to read novels depicting sexual violence as if in a court of law. Adjudicative reading tracks characters’ motivations and the physical outcomes of their actions as if novels can offer evidence, or lack thereof, of criminal conduct. This legalistic style of criticism not only ignores the fictionality of incidences of rape in novels, but it replicates the prejudices inherent in historical rape law by centering the experiences of the accused character over and against the harm caused to the fictional victim of rape. By contrast, the “capacious” conception of rape proposed here refuses to locate rape in a particular bodily act (as the law does), rejects the yoking of rape’s harms to a particular gender, and understands various forms of violence as equally serious (rather than creating a hierarchy of sexual assault, as current legal conceptions tend to do).

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