Who is criminally responsible when an autonomous car is involved in a car accident such as the accident in Arizona? The immediate suspects include: the user, the software company, the car manufacturer, the car itself and a hacker. In this blogpost Dalit Ken-Dror Feldman takes a closer look at this questions and answers it from…

Discussing whether a machine is intelligent is relevant, but more urgent is the question whether our collaborations with machines are intelligent. An intelligent collaboration with Artificial Intelligence (AI) requires complementary traits, since there is no point in teamwork when all actors possess similar qualities. Consciousness, common sense, intuition, intentionality, imagination, morality, emotional intelligence and phenomenological…

AI has the potential to make decisions and optimise processes – for example in medical treatments. But the new kind of AI-infused decision making works in obscure ways and we need transcriptions. Aviva de Groot describes in her blogpost, how to appreciate the aspect of dignity – an elusive ingredient of a ‘right to explanation’…

What are the key ethical, legal and social (ELS) issues of social robots? How can these challenges be addressed? To answer these questions, Christoph Lutz conducted with two research colleagues four interactive and interdisciplinary workshops during leading robotics conferences. Here, he reports on some of the key findings and implications.   Social robots: what are…

GDPR has shown that law and computer science have more in common than one might initially assume. It is therefore even more important to find a common language for the two disciplines. Former associate researcher Sibylle Schupp’s comment stresses the importance of the collaboration between law and computer science. The article was first published in…

The We-Publish Infrastructure implements the idea of a media currency (“Medienfranken”) in the form of a cryptocurrency and establishes an decentralised infrastructure for the media and journalists on a blockchain. Thanks to the combination of the two infrastructures, the transparency and autonomy over information selection will be improved and the independence of the media houses…

Open innovation – the strategic opening of innovation processes for external or even lay persons – is not yet very widespread in Germany. Other countries are already much further along, as two examples from Scandinavia show. The article by guest author Christin Skiera was previously published in Merton Magazin. The following article is currently only…

New technologies like AI open up a lot of chances but also bear many risks. Couldn’t we just learn how to deal with this from science-fiction films having already played through the major issues of AI? Unfortunately not. Rather than give advice, science-fiction distracts from the currently relevant ethical and legal challenges of AI and…

While all eyes are on Western industrial nations, Nigerian human rights lawyer Olumide Babalola is concerned about AI regulation in Africa. He fears that some countries will adopt the repressive legislation of their neighbouring states without developing their own attitude towards artificial intelligence. But a common vision for Africa’s digital future is missing. When I…

There hardly exists a buzzword today that fires everybody‘s imagination in the tech world like “artificial intelligence” (AI). But not only giants like Google, Facebook, Baidu or Alibaba are trying to overbid each other with new applications – also states around the globe have proclaimed to partake in a global AI race. Germany was rather…