Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

Tagcriminal justice

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Internet law concept

Can a Robot be Arrested and Prosecuted?

An Uber driver is held liable if he runs over someone. But what if a driverless taxi ran over someone?

The title, “Can a Robot Be Arrested? Hold a Patent? Pay Income Taxes?”, is bound to attract clicks and attention. Posted on the IEEE Spectrum site, a podcast transcript by that name reports Steven Cherry’s interview of Ryan Abbott about artificial intelligence and the law. Abbott, a physician, lawyer, and professor, wrote the aptly titled book, The Reasonable Robot: Artificial Intelligence and the Law, published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. To the point: Can a robot be arrested? Technically, an arrest occurs when a person is forcibly but lawfully detained. Of course, one can forcibly detain a robot – we’ve seen that done in many science fiction movies. Abbott was talking specifically about how criminal law should apply to actions taken by artificial intelligence (AI) Read More ›

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Free-range red angus cattle on pasture, Argentina.

No Free Will Means No Justice

Materialist biologist Jerry Coyne doesn’t seem to understand what denying free will would mean for the criminal justice system

Without free will, no one is innocent. Who asks cattle on the way to the abattoir if they are guilty or innocent?

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Scrabble pieces with numbers and letters

The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves

The patterns uncovered by machine learning may reflect a larger reality or just a bias in gathering data

Because Machine Learning is opaque—even experts cannot clearly explain how a system arrived at a conclusion—we treat it as magic. Therefore, we should mistrust the systems until proven innocent (and correct).

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Ethics for an Information Society

Because machines can’t learn to solve their own ethical problems
AI (machine learning) was probably faster and cheaper but the whole point of the system was supposed to be justice which, whatever the explanation, proved too difficult to calculate… Read More ›