Robots, Standards and the Law: Rivalries between Private Standards and Public Policymaking for Robot Governance

Abstract

This article explains the complex intertwinement between public and private regulators in the case of robot technology. Public policymaking ensures broad multi-stakeholder protected scope, but its abstractness often fails in intelligibility and applicability. Private standards, on the contrary, are more concrete and applicable, but most of the times they are voluntary and reflect industry interests. The 'better regulation' approach of the EU may increase the use of evidence to inform policy and lawmaking, and the involvement of different stakeholders. Current hard-lawmaking instruments do not appear to take advantage of the knowledge produced by standard-based regulations, virtually wasting their potential benefits. This fact affects the legal certainty with regards to a fast-paced changing environment like robotics. In this paper, we investigate the challenges of overlapping public/private regulatory initiatives that govern robot technologies in general, and in the concrete of healthcare robot technologies. We wonder until what extent robotics should be governed only by standards. We also reflect on how public policymaking could increase their technical understanding of robot technology to devise an applicable and comprehensive framework for this technology. In this respect, we propose different ways to integrate the technical know-how into policymaking (e.g., collecting the data/knowledge generated from the im-✩ This paper is the result of a joint effort of the two authors. However, Section III and the Proposal 1 in Section IV are more properly attributable to Eduard Fosch-Villaronga, while Section II and the Proposals 2 and 3 in Section IV are more properly attributable to Angelo Jr Golia. All the other parts are attributable to both authors. RR This paper has been produced by a member of the Microsoft Cloud Computing Research Centre, a collaboration between the Cloud Legal Project at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies University of London and the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. The author is grateful to Microsoft for the generous financial support that has made this project possible. Responsibility for views expressed, however, remains with the author.

Harnessing robot experimentation to optimize the regulatory framing of emerging robot technologies

“…In other words, the idea behind PROPELLING is using science to help the law keep up with the pace of technology development. This process can make interventions more precise and concrete, allowing for easier compliance and virtually not wasting the potential testing zones to generate relevant knowledge for policymaking (Fosch-Villaronga and Golia, 2019).…”

“…Accessing and processing the information gathered in the databases EUROBENCH aims to create could be valuable for informing policymaking (Fosch-Villaronga et al, 2018; Fosch-Villaronga and Golia, 2019). These SDRs can take the form of databases compiling the results of reproducible experiments and risk assessments, along with related robot legislation/regulation collected over time and across many projects (Fosch-Villaronga et al, 2018; Fosch-Villaronga and Golia, 2019). Documenting and formalizing these processes (in lessons learned) would allow the regulatory framework to have a grounded knowledge and understanding of what characteristics and regulatory needs new robot technologies have, and this knowledge could be highly valuable for future developers and policymakers.…”

Autonomous Mobile Robots in High Occupancy Aerospace Manufacturing

“…In the context of delivery robots, robots are a clear example of how technological developments give rise to legislative gaps [10]. There are no explicit laws around autonomous robots, other than the standards set and promised by manufacturers.…”

“…In a report issued by the House of Lords [11] explained that "while AI-specific regulation is not appropriate at this stage… Existing regulators are best placed to regulate AI in their respective sectors." It can also be seen in the USA, that companies that are at the forefront of these issues often help to shape the future of the legislation around them such as Estonian AMR company Starship [10]. Supplementary standards and regulations also appear in the form of British Standards (BS), International standards Organization (ISO) documents and Health and Safety Executive (HSE) documents [12][13][14] [15].…”

The fundamental legal values of modern legal regulation

“…Modern legal regulation is a dynamic process that changes under the influence of numerous conditions and reasons. Digitalization, the development of high technologies [1], which determine the search, on the one hand, for value foundations, and on the other, for legal instruments for regulating new legal relations, which can also be regarded as values.…”