Intelligent Robots, Cyborgs, Genetically Enhanced Individuals, Chimeras: the Future and the Challenges of Law

Abstract

Objective: to identify theoretical and legal problems associated with the steadily increasing spread of digital and biotechnologies’ development products; to assess the risks associated with this process that can change the position of a human in the society of the future; to develop and substantiate proposals to minimize risks and eliminate the identified problems through legal regulation.Methods: the research is based on the methods of generalization of scientific and technical information and theoretical analysis used while studying the source materials; axiological and systematic approaches; the formal legal method and, in addition, methods of legal forecasting, primarily extrapolation, which made it possible to highlight the prospects for reforming law due to technological expansion.Results: include a description of the dynamics of digital and bio-technologies’ development; a description of the changing social landscape with the emerging new types of entities that can affect the actual status of a human; a classification of risks threatening people due to the digital and biotechnologies development; a list of tasks whose solution based on law will help to eliminate, postpone or, at least, significantly reduce the severity of problems by increasing the time limit allotted to humanity to comprehend a number of conceptual points. The author presents arguments substantiating the need to develop special legal regulation in relation to new types of entities, the appearance of which becomes an inevitable result of the mentioned technologies’ development.Scientific novelty: consists, first, in a comprehensive study of the development of interconnected groups of digital and biotechnologies, taking into account their increasing convergence; and, second, in the formulation of legal problems that need to be resolved due to the potential emergence of new types of entities with cognitive functions and capable of having a targeted intellectual impact on the environment and legal entities.Practical significance: it is present in the answers given to the formulated legal questions, which contain suggestions and recommendations on the necessary adjustment of legal regulation and focus the attention of legal scholars on the problems arising from the pace and vectors of scienceconsuming technologies’ development.

Keywords

• artificial intelligence
• biotechnologies
• cyborg
• digital technologies
• genetic engineering
• human
• law
• neurotechnologies
• risk
• robot