For society to enjoy many of the benefits of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, it will be necessary to deal with situations that arise in which autonomous artificial agents violate laws or cause harm. If we want to allow AIs and robots to roam the internet and the physical world and take actions that are unsupervised by humans — as may be necessary for, e.g. personal shopping assistants, self-driving cars, and host of other applications — we must be able to manage the liability for the harms they might cause to individuals and property. Resolving this issue will require untangling a set of theoretical and philosophical issues surrounding causation, intention, agency, responsibility, culpability and compensation, and distinguishing different varieties of agency, such as causal, legal and moral. With a clearer understanding of the central concepts and issues, this project will provide a better foundation for developing policies which will enable society to utilize artificial agents as they become increasingly autonomous, and ensuring that future artificial agents can be both robust and beneficial to society, without stifling innovation.

This project addresses a central issue — “the liability problem” — facing the regulation of artificial computational agents, including artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic systems, as they become increasingly autonomous, and supersede current capabilities. In order for society to benefit from advances in AI technology, it will be necessary to develop regulatory policies which manage the risk and liability of deploying systems with increasingly autonomous capabilities. However, current approaches to liability have difficulties when it comes to dealing with autonomous artificial agents because their behavior may be unpredictable to those who create and deploy them, and they will not be proper legal agents. The project will explore the fundamental concepts of autonomy, agency and liability; clarify the different varieties of agency that artificial systems might realize, including causal, legal and moral; and the illuminate the relationships between these. The project will take a systematic approach by integrating an analysis of fundamental concepts “including autonomy, agency, causation, intention, responsibility and culpability” and their applicability to autonomous artificial agents, surveying current legal approaches to liability, and exploring possible approaches for future regulatory policy. It will deliver a book-length publication containing the theoretical research results and recommendations for policy-making.