Interview of Mady DELVAUX (S&amp;D,LU), Rapporteur&nbsp;after the vote on Civil Law Rules on Robotics at the Committee on Legal Affairs, in the EP in Brussels.

Brussels

interview

use of robotics and artificial intelligence (T)

DELVAUX, Mady (S&D, LU)

Civil Law Rules on Robotics: interview of Mady DELVAUX (S&D,LU), Rapporteur

SOUNDBITE (English), Mady DELVAUX (S&amp;D, LU), Rapporteur, What are the most important issues? of course standardisation, said also in the interest of the common internal market because Europe is good in Robotics but if we want to remain leaders in this we need to have a common European industry and cooperation. Second one is liability because I believe that if robots come into the market costumers need to be sure that they will be assured if a damage occurs because of the action of robots. And then the big big issue is of course safety, privacy because a robot cannot function without an exchange of data, so the questions: who has access to this data? How long can it be stored? what about the info is concerned? And all of these questions have to be solved.

SOUNDBITE (English), Mady DELVAUX (S&amp;D, LU), Rapporteur, We&rsquo;ve proposed a two steps approach. The first step would be to create a legal framework for the robots that are now on the market and that will come in the next 10 to 15 years. And then with self-learning robots it will be more difficult to establish who is liable for accidents because if a robot is self-learning, it&rsquo;s difficult to identify who is the cause of a damage.

SOUNDBITE (English), Mady DELVAUX (S&amp;D, LU), Rapporteur, What is important in my view is that if there is a harm, the victim of this harm must receive compensation, but it&rsquo;s clear that this has to be transparent and clear to the costumer because otherwise they will be no trust, and trust is what we need.

SOUNDBITE (English), Mady DELVAUX (S&amp;D, LU), Rapporteur, Robots will not totally replace humans. There will be a cooperation between robots and humans and I imagine that everyone can learn to work together with a robot. We have to respect some principles of security and safety, but this will be possible. We ask to the Commission to look at the evolution what kind of jobs or, to be more precise, what kind of tasks will be taken over by robots? And there is a discussion on whether we have to change our social security systems? and even if we have to think about a universal revenue, because if there are many unemployed we need, nevertheless, to assure that they can have a decent life. So these are different scenarios that we have to study and prepare for.

SOUNDBITE (English), Mady DELVAUX (S&amp;D, LU), Rapporteur, A robot is not a human, and a robot will never be a human. A robot can show empathy but it will never feel empathy and this what we have to tell people; and also in this report we say that we don&rsquo;t want to have this confusion between robots and humans. So, we have a charter, we propose a charter for designers, for producers, for ethical committees, that they should always look not to make people dependent, emotionally dependent. You can be dependent physically because you need a robot to do some task but you must never think that a robot is a human and that he loves you or that he&rsquo;s sad together with you, but he can show this. And of course, this is one of the interesting evolutions that we will see. What will happen?