The Laws and Regulation of AI and Autonomous Systems

Our regulatory systems have attempted to keep abreast of new technologies by recalibrating and adapting our regulatory frameworks to provide for new opportunities and risks, to confer rights and duties, safety and liability frameworks, and to ensure legal certainty for businesses. These adaptations have been reactive and sometimes piecemeal, often with artificial delineation on rights and responsibilities and with unintended flow-on consequences. Previously, technologies have been deployed more like tools, but as autonomy and self-learning capabilities increase, robots and intelligent AI systems will feel less and less like machines and tools. There is now a significant difference, because machine learning AI systems have the ability to learn, adapt their performances and ‘make decisions’ from data and ‘life experiences’. This chapter provides brief insights on some of the topical developments in our regulatory systems and the current debates on some of the risks and challenges from the use and actions of AI, autonomous and intelligent systems [1].