Inclusive realities, where decision making in all spheres of life becomes more and more shared with algorithmic technologies or presence of robots, either in traditional or new social phenomena, requires reconceptualisation of design approaches and the improving of general understanding of role and responsibility of the algorithm. Legal scholarship is the final instance for building the definitions, and the current state of research in Law is polemic. The panel reconnects professors working with different aspects of legal innovation and law transformations in regard of robots arriving to people's everyday life. Telepresence, 5G, sensor technologies, and the new types of subjectivity, augmented reality and metahuman systems require the consideration of legal aspects and the analysis of Law. Many questions are solved by theorists and practitioners on the disruptive social innovation with robots. 

What could go wrong? There have been some suggestions that robots and artificial intelligence might be given legal personality, creating an entity that can be sued when something goes wrong. Granting legal personality does not hinge on being “like” humans as other legal constructions (such as corporations) have legal personality. However, there are a number of challenges, including: (1) identifying the legal person within complex systems; (2) ensuring accountability in the absence of any psychological fear of punishment, and (3) defining pre-requisites to legal personality. Beyond that is the question of what problem we are trying to solve and whether legal personality is the best solution.

This paper seeks to make sense of the social significance and consequences of technologies that have been deliberately designed and deployed for social presence and interaction. The question that frames the examination—“Should social robots have standing?”—is derived from an agenda-setting publication in environmental law and ethics written by Christopher Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects. In extending this mode of inquiry to social robots, the paper will 1) investigate whether and to what extent robots can or should have standing, 2) evaluate the benefits and the costs of recognizing legal status, when it involves technological objects and artifacts, and 3) respond to and provide guidance for developing an intelligent and informed plan for the responsible integration of social robots. 

It is possible that there are good reasons not to recognize a legal personality for autonomous systems, but there is no good reason not to debate the topic. On February 16, 2017, the European Parliament asked the Commission to explore the possibility of recognizing a specific legal status for robots, so that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots can be considered as electronic persons responsible for compensation for any damage they cause. The reaction is one of total closure. However, there are several good reasons to critically re-examine the reasons for this opposition.

Existing accountability mechanisms for AI and robotics are heavily lacking. While novel regulatory solutions like the European AI Act (AIA) attempt to define red lines on AI which is impermissible in Europe, their deference to industry standards is so great that the relevance of the whole AIA as a regulatory tool has been questioned. At the same time both the IEEE and other industry standards bodies are pushing for more ethical AI and robotics or even ethical black boxes. But will these novel measures provide for actual accountability in practice? We argue that these measures will be unable to provide meaningful accountability in practice while they remain dependent on current industry standards bodies. While the wish to collaborate with industry is understandable in terms of developing feasible solutions, that reality of current industry collaborations seems to suggest making accountability impossible. In conclusion, we will suggest ways of re-configuring the public-private relationship to ensuring meaningful accountability can be achieved.