Is It Time to Consider EU Criminal Law Rules on Robotics?

Abstract

This paper is devoted to issues which have not been sufficiently explored in European literature, and which have had fragmented consideration in comparative literature. These issues raise the question of whether the EU legislator should develop a framework of criminal law rules which would regulate the use of Artificial Intelligence (hereinafter: AI) in the near future, and what such rules should specifically address. The authors recognise two issues of particular importance for the future regulation of AI development within the EU, and offer their perspective on the areas which should be subjected to regulation in this regard. In order to provide a systematic overview of this topic, the paper starts with a description of the recent regulatory action of the EU in the field of AI, with special reflection on the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI. The authors then describe what are, in their opinion, the most important intersections of AI and criminal law in the broader sense, and in conclusion present their views of which areas should be specifically regulated by EU legislature in this context. Keywords: robot, Artificial Intelligence, criminal law, criminal procedure, autonomous, sanctions, European Union.   This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution − Non-Commercial − No Derivatives 4.0 International License.   Suggested citation: I Vuletic and T Petrasevic, ‘Is it Time to Consider EU Criminal Law Rules on Robotics?’ (2020) 16 CYELP 225.