The Wild West of Robot Law

The new hit HBO television show Westworld is an American science fiction show, which taps into our hopes and fears about robots. The show imagines a technologically advanced Wild West theme park, which is populated by androids and robots who are called ‘hosts.’ Wealthy human ‘visitors’ come to the entertainment precinct to indulge their dreams and fantasies. Westworld is a mediation upon the law, ethics, and social norms in respect of robots. As a disruptive technology, robotics is transforming our society and our economy. Robots have been increasingly deployed in innovation as part of Australia’s “Ideas Boom”. There has been a mixture of hope and anxiety as to how robotics and artificial intelligence will affect jobs, education and employment. This is certainly apparent in the legal profession. In terms of transportation, there are autonomous vehicles, drones, and aquabots. Robots have been deployed in agriculture, hospitals, and the environment. Robots increasingly feature in civilian law enforcement, and the military battlefield. There has been a growing debate about the regulation of robots, across a range of contexts. Policy-makers, lawyers, philosophers, and experts have been grappling with the legal, ethical, and public policy challenges posed by robotics. There has been a concerted effort by academics and scholars to develop the discipline of Robot Law as an organised and systematic field of jurisprudence. There have been regular ‘We Robot’ conferences in North America. The book Robot Law – edited by Ryan Calo, A. Michael Froomkin and Ian Kerr – represents a collective effort to survey the emerging field. In his introduction, Froomkin comments: ‘Like the Internet before it, robotics is a socially and economically transformative technology.’ He observes that ‘the increasing sophistication of robots and their widespread deployment everywhere from the home to hospitals, public spaces, and the battlefield requires rethinking a wide variety of philosophical and public policy issues, interacts uneasily with existing legal regimes, and thus may counsel changes in policy and in law.’ In many respects, robotics remains like the Wild West – a frontier realm, which is as much regulated by social norms and the marketplace, as by legal rules.