The robotic invasion is inevitable. You need not worry about an altered taste in your everyday cup of coffee, thanks to the robotic coffee baristas. The hospitals are less pone to life-threatening errors due to the implementation of robotic carers. The military and law enforcement continues to benefit from drones. Not to forget the debut of the self-driving cars so that you don’t need to strain your foot on the gas pedal continually.
As such robotic revolutions make a permanent entrance into our lives, we thus enter into an unavoidable arm wrestle with the federal law system. It is the nemesis that robotization has to deal with before feeling the full embrace of humanity’s open arms. The article thus considers the bond between the Federal Law System and Robotization and if it is strong enough to form a lasting relationship for the benefit of the robot-thirsty human society. It is, therefore, a matter of how the lawmakers can craft better rules and how the robotic designs by engineers meet the standard of such regulations such that they do not violate the societal values and norms.
The Robotic Law Implementation Challenges
Despite the futuristic promise of robotic technologies, the capability of how the current Federal Law System intends to handle them still draws worrying questions. This generic statement sets the premise of the possible considerations to follow before the machines receive liabilities and rights to operate under the umbrella of human society safely. Firstly, it is necessary to bring to discussion the adequacy of the existing robotic regulations and their flexibility in accommodating the upcoming robotic technologies mature enough to bond with human society. An ontological approach, which studies the nature of beings, is, therefore, not a suited path to intermarry the Federal Law System and the Robotic Technologies. An ideal approach would be through the functional overviews tied to the robotic technologies’ rules. They include:
- The applicable robotic rules
- The provided incentives by such rules
- The desirability criteria of such incentives
Political relevance also shows its viability in growing the robotic industry like the strategic importance drawn from the case of the European Parliament Resolution. The projected considerations and set conclusions will determine the execution of rules and law milestones that will either empower robotization or cripple their rise to glory in human society.
The Underlying Issues in Implementing the Federal Law System
Definitions: The first step that the Federal Law System needs to take before pouring the rules to govern robotics is first correctly to define a robot based on a functional approach. It is thus impossible to regulate what you cannot explain. Hence, looking at a robot in an absolute sense will lead to more arrays of definition due to its dynamic applicability. Therefore, a unitary body of rules cannot exist to manage all the robotic applications in existence sufficiently. It is an impossible venture. Thus classifying the robots in classes will make it easy for the applied class-rules to be more manageable and visibly effective.
Liabilities: The robotic Civil Law Rules face a major setback when it comes to discussing and handling the liability for damages. The increased adaptation of automated robotic products is, to some extent, a challenge to several paradigms. It foresters collaboration arising from the human-machine cooperation. It, in turn, causes an overlap in the existing set of rules as the laws governing the machines to collide with the laws governing the humans. Thus this collaboration causes unanticipated regulations collision and uncertainties. Therefore when new products need insurance, they face the obstacle of increased litigation.
Testing: In a laboratory or prototype environment, a robot set for the industrial world is under the safety net of a carefully designed and planned testing environment. Such a legal robotic testing framework, however, does not apply outside this restricted environment. Thus, the question of insurance purpose to the outside environments remains tied to the parameters that govern the testing environment. Standardization, therefore, becomes a challenge as it is challenging to present an adequate and narrow-tailored technical standard that applies to all robots from different testing environments. The existing liability rules fail to match with a working consistency under product safety and adoption.
Electronic Personhood: It speaks of how close a robot is to embracing human personalities or traits. Personhood attributions under the robotization discussion often find itself as a potential non-issue. Looking at it from an ontological approach often misrepresents it in legal, philosophical, and technical considerations. However, if its assessment is from a functional perspective, the legal personhood attributes like in corporations might be viable for discussion. When specific applications are under consideration, like human enhancements and its implementation in particular biorobotic devices, regulating and managing personhood then becomes a major priority. The near future will thus have to find a way to cope with bioethical issues that will force the adoption of ad-hoc regulations.
Privacy and the Free Flow of Data: The protocols for accessing usable data and using the same data is of vital importance. Such regulations are a requirement that should be executable at the development phases of the robotic industries before they hit the digital market. Collected user data is often on a hierarchy of access levels. If a single Federal Law System governs all these hierarchy levels, then the restricted access levels will suffer the fate of unwarranted privacy breach and unsanctioned data flow due to such regulatory bias. It, therefore, presents the challenge of a law that is inflexible or does not modularize all aspects of the privacy and data access issues.
The Verdict on the Federal Law System Versus Robotization
The viability of the Federal Law System under robotization will first need to address the issues mentioned above to regard it as a viable stepping stone for governing the robotic world. Thus the tailoring of such a set of rules requires an adequate and technical framework with consistent and depictable considerations. Hence the definition of a sustainable modern legal system cannot escape the claws of politics and, at the same time, need strategical stamina to survive its implementation.
Definitions: Nominalistic discussions should not fall under the clause of robotic regulatory adoptions. An elaboration should be on the narrower considerations, which will make it easier to pool similar functional robotic applications on a single cluster. The functional similarities of such robotic applications will make them ideal candidates for unitary law regulations.
Liability: The overlapping rules due to human-machine cooperation delay the innovative process due to high litigation and uncertainty levels. A reasonable approach would be to separate the product safety function from the victim compensation function. Thus it will justify and force the adoption of different alternative solutions. The solution preference will depend on the insurance risk at hand, the products market, and the considered application class.
Testing: The adoption of a uniform yet simultaneous set of rules that allow for both the laboratory testing environment and the outside testing environment should be in place. Such practices will define the precise standards for the Federal Law System to reference during its operational execution. Thus the management, insurance, and safety of such laboratories and outside-world experiments will help tame the local authorities’ discretionary powers.
Electronic personhood: This issue only exists on a functional level. It is purely applicable in the facilitation of specific devices management, insurance, and registration. If the Federal Law System can group such similar devices based on standard functionality, then it would be easier to regulate them without compromise.
Privacy and Data Access: Informed consent does not depict the freedom of confidentiality. Adopting specific standards under the robotic design principles will classify and regulate the different application classes based on authorization and authentication.
If the Federal Law System sets the rules to govern robotization, then the unintended hiccups won’t be a problem. It must, however, be flexible and modularize all aspects of robotization. They entail the ones broken down into module segments on a single or conjoined application. The Federal Law System should regard and classify robotization based on functional similarities and not similar design criterion. It would then be easy to manage and insure such robotic products through the Federal Laws with little design versus functionality conflict or misrepresentation.
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