Until robots and humans mostly worked in fast-paced and yet separate environments, occupational health and safety (OHS) rules could address workers’ safety largely independently from robotic conduct. This is no longer the case: collaborative robots (cobots) working alongside humans warrant the design of policies ensuring the safety of both humans and robots at once, within shared spaces and upon delivery of cooperative workflows. Within the European Union (EU), the applicable regulatory framework stands at the intersection between international industry standards and legislation at the EU as well as Member State level. Not only do current standards and laws fail to satisfactorily attend to the physical and mental health challenges prompted by human–robot interaction (HRI), but they exhibit important gaps in relation to smart cobots (“SmaCobs”) more specifically. In fact, SmaCobs combine the black-box unforeseeability afforded by machine learning with more general HRI-associated risks, towards increasingly complex, mobile and interconnected operational interfaces and production chains. Against this backdrop, based on productivity and health motivations, we urge the encoding of the enforcement of OHS policies directly into SmaCobs. First, SmaCobs could harness the sophistication of quantum computing to adapt a tangled normative architecture in a responsive manner to the contingent needs of each situation. Second, entrusting them with OHS enforcement vis-à-vis both themselves and humans may paradoxically prove safer as well as more cost-effective than for humans to do so. This scenario raises profound legal, ethical and somewhat philosophical concerns around SmaCobs’ legal personality, the apportionment of liability and algorithmic explainability. The first systematic proposal to tackle such questions is henceforth formulated. For the EU, we propose that this is achieved through a new binding OHS Regulation aimed at the SmaCobs age.

中文翻译：

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将安全标准的执行编码到智能机器人中，以利用其计算复杂性和协作潜力：欧盟政策制定者的法律风险评估

在机器人和人类主要在快节奏且独立的环境中工作之前，职业健康和安全（OHS）规则可以在很大程度上独立于机器人的行为来解决工人的安全问题。现在情况已不再是这样：与人类一起工作的协作机器人（cobot）需要设计政策，确保在共享空间内和交付协作工作流程时同时确保人类和机器人的安全。在欧盟 (EU) 内，适用的监管框架处于国际行业标准与欧盟及成员国层面立法的交叉点。当前的标准和法律不仅未能令人满意地解决人机交互（HRI）带来的身心健康挑战，而且在更具体的智能协作机器人（“SmaCobs”）方面也表现出重要差距。事实上，SmaCobs 将机器学习提供的黑匣子不可预见性与更普遍的 HRI 相关风险结合起来，面向日益复杂、移动和互连的操作界面和生产链。在此背景下，基于生产力和健康动机，我们敦促将 OHS 政策的执行直接编码到 SmaCobs 中。首先，SmaCobs 可以利用量子计算的复杂性，以响应每种情况的偶然需求的方式调整错综复杂的规范架构。其次，矛盾的是，委托他们对自己和人类执行职业健康安全措施可能比人类这样做更安全，也更具成本效益。这种情况引发了围绕 SmaCobs 的法律人格、责任分配和算法可解释性的深刻的法律、伦理和哲学方面的担忧。解决这些问题的第一个系统性建议就此出台。对于欧盟，我们建议通过针对 SmaCobs 时代的新的具有约束力的 OHS 法规来实现这一目标。