Robotic Law: The Legal Personality of the Robot

This is a unique and seminal book for knowledge areas such as law, technology and cybernetics.

Author researches the concept of a person since pre-Socratic to contemporary philosophers. Then he investigated which characteristics of human being Law apprehended to treat the Man in different way from everything else in order to attribute to him the legal status of Person, subject of rights as opposed to object of rights. He highlights the concepts of brain, mind end intelligence and also the meaning of conscious and unconscious derived from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

He also studied the theory of evolution and artificial life to grasp the concept of life in order to discern when one faces a living being, no matter its organic or synthetic and to present his opinion on what intelligence is and how an unintelligent or less intelligent process car result in greater intelligence, like evolution of species.

The author enters the fields of cybernetic and artificial intelligence and embraces the lessons of para-consistent logic, autopoiesis and the law of accelerated returns reaching the concept of technological Singularity and post-humanity.

Marco Aurelio exams in depth the concept of the person under the law not adhering to the paradigm that considers only the Homo Sapiens as the only being that could achieve the status of Person. In order to make such conclusion he demonstrate the evolution of legal concept of person pointing out its origins at an object, a mask called persona on ancient Greek and Rome theater. Then he points out to the possibility of a synthetic creature be considered a Person. Moreover he concludes that the legal concept of Person derives from the law and is not a natural consequence of being human.

He also undertakes a comparative study of common law, Brazilian, Portuguese and Spanish Laws to verify how these system rules Person.

The book is plenty of enlightening examples of the various problems it faces and presents startling conclusions that breaks paradigms and warns of scenarios that may arises from technological evolution.

The text flows in a dense but graceful way and encourages reading to the end. It arouses varied opinions about the author`s conclusions. Cautious he warns that conclusions are not predictions but starting points for further studies.

It is possibly the first thesis in the world to address the subject of legal personality of robots with such density and multidisciplinary approach, something unthinkable when his initial papers and researches were published some twenty years ago and when the first edition of the book was published in Brazil. What is increasingly accepted today was unspeakable at that time.

For all it represents, this book is mandatory for at least Law, Cybernetics, Information Technology, Engineering Philosophy, Sociology students and professionals.