EU Regulation of Smart Robotics - Too Much, Too Soon? - Symposium 2024

Brussels is in a regulatory rush. Over the last few years, the EU has enacted a multitude of laws dealing with various aspects of the digital environment. Many of these laws lay down basic conditions for the development and deployment of AI-enhanced (‘smart’) robotics.
Making sense of this wave of regulation is far from easy, particularly as the laws frequently interact in complex, confusing, and sometimes disjointed ways. This presentation provides an overview of these laws, particularly in terms of their impact on smart robotics, and addresses the fundamental issue as to whether they may unnecessarily stifle the innovation that is key to a healthy robotics market.
This talk was given at the Hi! PARIS Symposium 2024 by Lee Bygrave, a Full Professor at the Department of Private Law, University of Oslo, where he is Director of the Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law. He is additionally Honorary Professor at the College of Law, Australian National University, Academic Affiliate of the Centre for Health, Law and Emerging Technologies at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the European Law Institute. Lee has carried out pioneering research and development of regulatory policy for information and communication technology for over three decades. He has world-class expertise on legal aspects of data privacy, cybersecurity, robotics, artificial intelligence, and governance of critical internet infrastructure. He is the author of two international standard texts in the field of data privacy law, and co-author and co-editor of the leading international commentary on the EU General Data Protection Regulation. His research output includes seminal analyses of, i.a., the legal-regulatory framework for automated decision-making, ‘cognitive sovereignty’ as a key interest affected by the opacity of machine-learning processes, the privacy implications of digital rights management systems, the use of ‘design-based’ regulatory techniques for integrating legal values into information systems architecture, contractual mechanisms for governance of digital networks and spaces, and the legal (mis)use of information concepts.