The Law of AI: A Renegotiation or a Reproduction Commentary on <i>Ryan Abbott, The Reasonable Robot</i>

Abstract

Ryan Abbott’s “The Reasonable Robot: Artificial Intelligence and the Law” offers a functional approach to the law of Artificial Intelligence (AI) robots. Soon, if not already, AIs will compete with human employees in a variety of tasks and fields—from manufacturing and transportation to programming and medicine—prompting the fourth industrial revolution.1 But Abbott does not find this to be as alarming as it may appear. Instead, while the transition period requires some state intervention, he argues, “[h]istory has shown [that] fears [of technological unemployment] were misplaced, at least in regard to concerns about long-term unemployment” (p. 5). What Abbott is concerned with is that competition between AIs and humans would be on equal footings. This concern is highlighted in the main theme of the book, the “principle of AI legal neutrality asserting that the law should not discriminate between AI and human behavior” (p. 3). AI legal neutrality “does not advocate for AI’s having legal rights or legal personhood” (p. 4). AIs are not artificial people and society should not advance their autonomy, freedom, or wellbeing (p. 33). Instead, legal neutrality is desirable because it helps the law better achieve its underlying goals.