Artificial intelligence in space
It addresses regulatory gaps for AI in space, which is an incremental step in adapting existing legal frameworks to emerging technologies.
The paper identifies legal and ethical challenges in applying AI to space activities, such as autonomous decision-making and data handling, and proposes developing a legal methodology to link AI systems to applicable rules, including making space law machine-readable for compliance.
In the next coming years, space activities are expected to undergo a radical transformation with the emergence of new satellite systems or new services which will incorporate the contributions of artificial intelligence and machine learning defined as covering a wide range of innovations from autonomous objects with their own decision-making power to increasingly sophisticated services exploiting very large volumes of information from space. This chapter identifies some of the legal and ethical challenges linked to its use. These legal and ethical challenges call for solutions which the international treaties in force are not sufficient to determine and implement. For this reason, a legal methodology must be developed that makes it possible to link intelligent systems and services to a system of rules applicable thereto. It discusses existing legal AI-based tools amenable for making space law actionable, interoperable and machine readable for future compliance tools.