Overview

The project centred around how we might approach answering the question of whether company law can, or should, be the primary means of regulating novel beings, and by extension their potential wide-ranging societal impacts, through future work.

This project was the first of its kind; no existing work has explored how to regulate advanced morally significant technology nor had the suitability of company law in specifically regulating the conduct of corporations in the development, operation and disposal of these technologies been considered. There is little existing literature in this area prior to publications related to this project, but we successfully established the need for significant work in this area.

The project was original in the way we applied traditional company law norms to ask questions and to consider regulation from a new angle, as well as in giving to the ‘novel being’ as opposed to the common topic of narrow AI, and what rights and obligations it might have from a range of perspectives.

Objectives

The conceptual research the practical objectives supported was arranged around three key areas, namely:

• Defining status: Analysis of legal status for novel beings for the purposes of regulation.

• Development: Whether the drivers of public companies (i.e. shareholder primacy) are appropriate drivers of morally significant technological development.

• Operation and Disposal: Who or what entity is responsible for the lifespan of the potential being, its deployment, and ultimate fate.

We made good inroads into establishing and understanding the fundamental issues behind each thread of this conceptual research, which was the intention of the project.