Robots and Artificial Intelligence are conquering our world. Just as any progress, this development is expected to have a relevant impact on law in general as well as on criminal law in particular. It involves the potential of transforming our conception of criminal responsibility, as notions of personhood, capacity and culpability will not stay unaffected. This article aims at giving an overview of the potential conversion criminal law is facing due to the increased importance of robotics and of artificial intelligence in our everyday lives. The discussion starts with an overview of different scenarios of criminal liability in the context of robotics. While some of them can be faced with existing doctrines, others demand a more far reaching assessment of the question if robots could ever gain legal personhood and therefore be originally called to account. While the picture of robots as liable perpetrators seems implausible at first sight, the present analysis reveals that blameworthiness is inherently socially constructed. However, it is not randomly constituted and follows social interaction and social meaning in fulfilling a certain function. Enabling the possibility of robots’ criminal liability therefore would require that robots are regarded as a suitable agent of responsibility. The article lights up the conditions for such social and legal change in rethinking the very nature of culpability having the overall function of criminal law in mind. It can be concluded that the on-going technological progress definitely has the potential of testing the theory of criminal responsibility while more clearly unveiling its foundations and its sociological implications. A guilty robot, however, as fictional as that appears today, may be nothing unrealistic nor unlikely in the future.

中文翻译：

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有罪的机器人？– 重新思考人工智能时代的罪责和法人的性质

机器人和人工智能正在征服我们的世界。正如任何进展一样，这一发展预计将对一般法律以及特别是刑法产生相关影响。它涉及改变我们刑事责任概念的潜力，因为人格、能力和罪责的概念不会不受影响。本文旨在概述由于机器人技术和人工智能在我们日常生活中的重要性日益增加而面临的潜在转换刑法。讨论首先概述了机器人技术背景下的不同刑事责任场景。虽然他们中的一些人可能会面对现有的教义，其他人要求对机器人是否能够获得法人资格并因此最初被追究责任的问题进行更深远的评估。虽然机器人作为有责任的肇事者的画面乍一看似乎令人难以置信，但目前的分析表明，应受指责本质上是社会建构的。但是，它不是随机构成的，它在履行某种功能时遵循社会互动和社会意义。因此，使机器人承担刑事责任的可能性需要机器人被视为合适的责任代理人。这篇文章阐明了这种社会和法律变化的条件，重新思考了罪责的本质，同时牢记了刑法的整体功能。可以得出结论，正在进行的技术进步肯定具有检验刑事责任理论的潜力，同时更清楚地揭示其基础及其社会学意义。然而，一个有罪的机器人，就像今天出现的那样虚构，在未来可能不是不现实的，也不是不可能的。