Review | When AI goes wrong who’s to blame, Singapore law professor asks; do we legally treat algorithms and machines as we once did mercenaries and miscreant animals?

Simon Chesterman, a law professor in Singapore, asks some sobering questions about legal responsibility for the decisions of AI machines and algorithms

Like mercenary troops, algorithms that decide on your guilt or innocence, or right to entitlements, lack moral intuition, he notes. So are we still in control?

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In the future, if armies deploy autonomous robot soldiers and they fire on the wrong targets, who will we hold responsible - the general who deployed them or their designer, Singapore law professor Simon Chesterman asks in We, the Robots. Photo: Getty Images/Tetra Images RF

Peter Neville-Hadley

Published: 6:15pm, 9 Oct 2021

We, the Robots? Regulating Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of the Law by Simon Chesterman, pub. Cambridge University Press

Isaac Asimov’s 1950s I, Robot stories were mostly to do with the problems of programming and regulating artificial intelligence (AI), and the practical, moral and legal consequences of hardwiring three governing laws into mechanical servants. He was less interested in the dystopian futures run by self-aware machines seen later in The Terminator or The Matrix but already common in science fiction even in his day.

Simon Chesterman’s non-fiction We, the Robots? is also less concerned with a hypothetical, still higher-tech future than with dealing with issues arising from the introduction of machine autonomy and the use of algorithms in decision-making.

Chesterman, dean and professor of law at the National University of Singapore, brings a sober but readable approach to a subject otherwise much given to speculation and fearmongering. He enlivens his work with stories from the real world: accidents involving self-driving cars; stock market collapses caused by automated trading; biases in the opaque proprietary software used to assess the likelihood an individual will default on a loan or repeat a criminal offence.

Passengers get off an autonomous bus developed by Chinese tech giant Baidu in Chongqing, where China’s first autonomous bus line started commercial operations in April, 2021. Photo Chen Shichuan/VCG via Getty Images

Existing laws and regulations, whose design was predicated on the direct involvement of humans, are already struggling to cope with problems arising merely from the speed of transaction made possible by ever-faster processors and computer-to-computer communications. Examples include the “flash crash” of 2018, in which US stock markets took a tumble driven by overenthusiastic algorithmic trading systems doing thousands of deals with each other in a matter of seconds.