Description

Considerable attention has been devoted in recent years to studying the normative challenges of artificial intelligence (“AI”). Whilst the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) conducted a series of public workshops on questions of AI and policy in 2016, culminating with a report that addresses the many ethical issues related to AI, such as fairness, accountability, and social justice, the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs and the UK House of Commons have released similar reports on how we should prepare for the future of AI. Against this framework, the aim of the lecture is threefold. First, attention is drawn to the different ways in which we can evaluate the moral dilemmas arising from this specific domain of technological research and development. Second, focus is on the primary rules of the law, so as to determine whether and to what extent we are confronted with legal loopholes, e.g. whether or not new legal rules should be added to the system due to, e.g., the unpredictability of AI decisions. Third, it is time to widen our perspective to include not only the hard tools of legal governance, but also to consider the role played by the secondary rules of the law. The overall aim of the lecture is to show how the mechanisms and procedures of legal flexibility provided by such secondary rules may shed light on the kinds of primary rules needed within the field of AI.

About The Speaker
A former lawyer and current professor of Jurisprudence at the Department of Law, University of Turin (Italy), he is Faculty Fellow at the Center for Transnational Legal Studies in London, U.K. and NEXA Fellow at the Center for Internet & Society at the Politecnico of Turin. Author of eleven monographs, numerous essays in scholarly journals and book chapters, co-editor of the AICOL series by Springer, he has been a member of several EU projects and researches, which include the RPAS Steering Group on drones, the Group of Experts for the Onlife Initiative set up by the European Commission, and Expert for the evaluation of proposals in the Horizon 2020 robotics program. He is also a member of the IEEE Global Ethics Initiative
Personal Data Committee and of the Ethical Advisory Board of the European Medical Information Framework. His main interests are in Artificial Intelligence & law, network and legal theory, and information technology law (specifically data protection law and copyright).