The Human Control Over Autonomous Robotic Systems: What Ethical and Legal Lessons for Judicial Uses of AI?

This contribution provides an overview of normative problems posed by increasingly autonomous robotic systems, with the goal of drawing significant lessons for the use of AI technologies in judicial proceedings, especially focusing on the shared control relationship between the human decision-maker (i.e. the judge) and the software system. The exemplary case studies that we zoom in concern two ethically and legally sensitive application domains for robotics: autonomous weapons systems and increasingly autonomous surgical robots. The first case study is expedient to delve into the normative acceptability issue concerning autonomous decision-making and action by robots. The second case study is used to investigate the human responsibility issue in human-robot shared control regimes. The convergent implications of both case studies for the analysis of ethical and legal issues raised by judicial applications of AI enable one to highlight the need for and core contents of a genuinely meaningful human control to be exerted on the operational autonomy, if any, of AI systems in judicial proceedings.