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Womble Bond Dickinson attorney Chris Mammen has long been interested in the intersection of artificial intelligence and the law, both in his practice as a tech-focused IP attorney and as an educator in technology and the law. So it is no surprise that Law.com turned to Mammen to review the new book, The Reasonable Robot: Artificial Intelligence and the Law.
The Reasonable Robot is written by Ryan Abbott, the University of Surrey professor who unsuccessfully petitioned to get patent offices in the US, UK and Europe to issue patents in the name of DABUS, an AI algorithm.
Mammen writes that Abbott advocates for “AI legal neutrality” on four main areas of the law: tax, tort, patents and criminal. While he finds it is “something of a stretch to connect them as Abbott has done,” he nonetheless says Abbott raises some issues worthy of further discussion, even if all of those questions are not answered in the book, and even if Mammen (and others) disagree with many of Abbott’s ultimate conclusions.
Mammen concludes: “In the end, I agree with Abbott on one point: we need to reckon, probably urgently, with the challenges to our legal system that AI will pose.”
