Law, society and technics

Abstract

As the technical environment of the modern societies are getting more and more complex, the “relationship” between the humans and the technology should be regulated as well. There are several fields where the involvement of the legislation is necessary in order to either promote new technologies because of given economical or political issues, or quite contrary, control/regulate the application of a certain technique in order to serve the best interest of the society. There are fields where ethical problems should be addressed today even the technology is not quite state-of-the-art yet, such as in the robot-human interfacing. This paper investigates how the terms of references of the vehicular electronic stability control (ESC) system was developed in the ECE-UN Working Party 29 domain in order to make the mandating of such systems in Europe possible. The paper discusses the special economical environment of the ESC systems, their impact on the traffic safety, especially the reduction of fatalities in road accidents. The different approaches in different business models of the truck fleet operators between Europe and USA is studied and its impact is shown on the legislative activities. Legal and moral issues are investigated as far as the role and liability of the driver in highly intelligent, and in some of the cases, in autonomous systems, as one of the most important dilemma of regulatory process: can the driver be eliminated - even only temporarily - from the vehicle control loop when his abilities are clearly not enough to provide a proper control, or he should be always in the position to overrule any kind of intelligent system?