NECROROBOTICS : The Ethics of Personalised Resurrection

Ethical and legal questions of robotic personalisation can be addressed in various ways. While seeking to theorise on ethical issues related to robotic personalisation, this paper proposes the concept of necrorobotics in order to target a particular space of personalisation, governed by a variety of norms: death, and the reuse of dead persons data to create robotic agency. Based on recent advancements in what is here labeled as resurrection technologies, the paper creates a speculative provocation in order to reflect on ethical implications of using AI-tools to bring back the sounds, textual behaviour and animated imagery of a deceased friend or close relative

On the Governance of Artificial Intelligence through Ethics Guidelines

This article uses a socio-legal perspective to analyse the use of ethics guidelines as governance tool in the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI). This has become a central policy area in several large jurisdictions, including China and Japan, as well as the EU, focused here. Particular emphasis is in this article placed on the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI published by the EU Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence in April 2019, as well as the White Paper on Artificial Intelligence, published by the EU Commission in February 2020. The guidelines are reflected against partially overlapping and already existing legislation as well as the ephemeral concept construct surrounding AI as such. The article concludes by pointing to the i) challenges of a temporal discrepancy between technological and legal change; ii) the need of moving from principle to process in the governance of AI, and iii) and the multidisciplinary needs in the study of contemporary applications of data-dependent AI

Karl Renner and (Intellectual) Property – How Cognitive Theory Can Enrich a Sociolegal Analysis of Contemporary Copyright

This article deals with copyright regulation meeting the quite rapid societal changes associated with digitization, and it does so by reinterpreting Karl Renner's classical texts in the light of contemporary cognitive theory of conceptual metaphors and embodiment. From a cognitive theory perspective, I focus on the notion that the legal norms only appear to be unchanged—the Renner distinction between form and function. This includes social norms, technological development, and changes in social structures in general, which create a social and cognitive reinterpretation of law. This article, therefore, analyzes the contemporary push for copyright as property, which I relate to historical claims for copyright as property as well as de facto legal revisions in intellectual property faced with the challenges of digitization. Of particular relevance here is what Renner described in terms of property as an “institution of domination and control,” and thus the increased measures for control that are added to a digital context in the name of copyright

Between Daring and Deliberating : 3G as a sustainability issue in Swedish spatial planning

The thesis shows how different aspects of sustainable development have been handled or not handled in the third generation infrastructure development in Sweden. The difference between the design of the 3G development - emphasizing competition, growth and regional access, based on a strong technological optimism - and the implementation, as the roll out struck the landscape, including the non-handled radiation issue and the legal changes in order to facilitate the roll out, is discussed and analyzed. The roll out formally started in late 2000 as the licence allocation process, the so called beauty contest, was finished. Four operators were to build partly competing systems within three years, each covering 8 860 000 persons, more than 99,98 percent of the populated areas. The Post and Telecommunications Agency can sanction operators not fulfilling licence conditions by a considerable fine. The coverage by the end of the period was between 66 and 74 percent of the promised 8 860 000, with only three remaining operators still participating. Not until 1 December 2006 did the first operator report the required coverage, followed by the two remaining operators by 1 June 2007. The municipal permit handling was blamed for the delay, a reason that “could not have been foreseen”, which helped the operators avoid sanctions from the PTA. The thesis shows that a slow municipal permit process can not explain the lack of coverage in some areas of Sweden. Environmental aspects were not handled at national level but assessed locally in the building permit handling, as well as the regional 12:6 consultations at the County Administrations. This is why the municipal permit process holds many of the keys regarding environmental management and planning. Therefore the permit processes regarding 3G masts has been charted as they developed in time and screened for main issues and conflicts. Public participation can be found in the local context tied to the legal concept of being a concerned party in the permit process, or the 12:6 consultation. In spite of this, the much debated radiation issue is lifted from the participative aspects and legally defined as not relevant. The theoretical basis of the analysis combines spatial planning and sociology of law, applying the sociological concept of norms as entities controlling action on the discussion of two different paradigms of governance derived from planning theory. The thesis project has been a part of a study within the MiSt programme, an interdisciplinary research programme on tools for environmental assessment in strategic decision making funded by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. Supervisors: professor Lars Emmelin, School of Planning, Blekinge Institute of Technology Karsten Åström, professor in sociology of law, Lund University

Metaphors, Law and Digital Phenomena: the Swedish pirate bay court case

This article uses conceptual metaphor theory to develop the concept of ‘skeumorphs’ (reuse of old concepts for new phenomena) in order to analyse the Swedish The Pirate Bay court case. In line with conceptual metaphor theory, which states that abstract thinking is largely metaphorical, the article argues that this is true also for digital phenomena that, thus, are largely understood through metaphors and skeumorphs. Also, when attempting to understand and conceptualize new digital phenomena such as The Pirate Bay (TPB), law in a digital society is inevitably affected. Hence, new phenomena can be fought over in a ‘battle of metaphors’, in the TPB court case, for example, evidenced by the arguments of seeing TPB as ‘a platform’, ‘bulletin board’, or an ‘impure search engine’. This, here argued, was of key relevance for the outcome of the case