What do you think?
Rate this book
A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents
“An extraordinarily good synthesis from an amazing range of philosophical, legal, and technological sources . . . the book will appeal to legal academics and students, lawyers involved in e-commerce and cyberspace legal issues, technologists, moral philosophers, and intelligent lay readers interested in high tech issues, privacy, [and] robotics.”
—Kevin Ashley, University of Pittsburgh School of Law As corporations and government agencies replace human employees with online customer service and automated phone systems, we become accustomed to doing business with nonhuman agents. If artificial intelligence (AI) technology advances as today’s leading researchers predict, these agents may soon function with such limited human input that they appear to act independently. When they achieve that level of autonomy, what legal status should they have? Samir Chopra and Laurence F. White present a carefully reasoned discussion of how existing philosophy and legal theory can accommodate increasingly sophisticated AI technology. Arguing for the legal personhood of an artificial agent, the authors discuss what it means to say it has “knowledge” and the ability to make a decision. They consider key questions such as who must take responsibility for an agent’s actions, whom the agent serves, and whether it could face a conflict of interest.
—Kevin Ashley, University of Pittsburgh School of Law As corporations and government agencies replace human employees with online customer service and automated phone systems, we become accustomed to doing business with nonhuman agents. If artificial intelligence (AI) technology advances as today’s leading researchers predict, these agents may soon function with such limited human input that they appear to act independently. When they achieve that level of autonomy, what legal status should they have? Samir Chopra and Laurence F. White present a carefully reasoned discussion of how existing philosophy and legal theory can accommodate increasingly sophisticated AI technology. Arguing for the legal personhood of an artificial agent, the authors discuss what it means to say it has “knowledge” and the ability to make a decision. They consider key questions such as who must take responsibility for an agent’s actions, whom the agent serves, and whether it could face a conflict of interest.
264 pages, Paperback
First published July 28, 2011
4 people are currently reading
30 people want to read
About the author
Samir Chopra
13 books32 followersSamir Chopra is Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He earned a BA in Mathematical Statistics from Delhi University (1984), an MS in Computer Science from the New Jersey Institute of Technology (1990) and a PhD in Philosophy from the City University of New York (2000). He has worked on logics for belief revision and merging; his current research interests include pragmatism, Nietzsche, the philosophical foundations of artificial intelligence, philosophy of law, the legal theory of artificial agents, and the politics and ethics of technology.
Samir is a blogger at The Pitch, ESPN-Cricinfo, and at http://samirchopra.com. He runs a
Tumblr at http://samirchopra.tumblr.com
Samir is a blogger at The Pitch, ESPN-Cricinfo, and at http://samirchopra.com. He runs a
Tumblr at http://samirchopra.tumblr.com
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
No one has reviewed this book yet.