Legal Aspects of Autonomous Systems: A Comparative Approach

Bringing together contributions from 19 authors with extensive academic and practical experience in this area, the book seeks to analyse the legal challenges that have arisen in the current context in the face of technological developments in the field of computational power, datafication and the growing autonomy of AI systems. Considering the legal framework that the general principles of private law and criminal law offer for the interpretation of the phenomenon of autonomous systems, the authors explore possible trajectories for the development of notions of civil and criminal liability; for understanding attribution links to autonomous systems and, in particular, for punishing unlawful conduct in connection to their operation.

Given that developments in the field of AI have advanced faster than legislative change processes, the book seeks to contribute to the reformulation and harmonization, at European level, of current regulatory frameworks, in order to keep up with technological changes and the challenges posed by autonomous systems in areas as diverse as data protection, intellectual property rights, the regulation of autonomous vehicles, the conclusion and termination of contracts resulting from automated decisions, blockchain technology or the use of AI applications in the financial sector.
This collective work results from the international conference Autonomous Systems and the Law organized by CIDP in April 2022 and is part of the Springer series Data Science, Machine Intelligence, and Law (DSMIL, volume 4).