Organised jointly by four law societies from four universities, the “Artificial Intelligence and Robot Law Summit” was held as an online seminar via Zoom on Saturday, 26 December 2020 (18:00–20:00). Speakers included Gökhan Ahi, Assoc. Prof. Hasan Sınar, Assoc. Prof. Sera Reyhani Yüksel and Vircon Legal co-founder Erdem Mümtaz Hacıpaşaoğlu.
Who is responsible when a system decides
The hard question in this field is not whether machines can bear legal responsibility — they cannot — but how to allocate responsibility among the humans and companies behind them when an autonomous system causes harm. The candidates are the developer who built the model, the company that put it on the market, the organisation that deployed it in a particular context, and the operator who was supposed to be supervising. Each has different information, different control and different capacity to prevent the harm.
Regulation has since answered part of this by splitting duties along that same chain. The EU AI Act distinguishes the provider that develops and places a system on the market from the deployer that uses it, imposes human oversight obligations on high-risk uses, and requires reporting of serious incidents. Turkish companies serving EU users are frequently in scope without an EU entity — see Your Server Is in Turkey, Your Customer Is in Europe.
Alongside that sits ordinary product liability, which asks whether the thing was defective rather than whether anyone was careless — a framework that fits software awkwardly and is being adapted accordingly. Our current map of the field is the AI Compliance Hub.
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