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Robots May Inspire Suits Against Programmers
cpu6502 writes "Robert Silverberg wrote a recent editorial about the dangers of robots and the legal consequences for their programmers and engineers: 'Consider malicious kids hacking into a house that uses a robot cleaning system and reprogramming the robot to smash dishes and break furniture. If the hackers are caught and sued, but turn out not to have any assets, isn't it likely that the lawyers will go after the programmer who designed it or the manufacturer who built it? In our society, the liability concept is upwardly mobile, searching always for the deepest pocket.'"
Maybe... But last I saw, Ford Motor Company wasn't liable for drunk drivers that use their vehicles to drink and drive, resulting in death or destruction of property. This makes me think that engineering a product doesn't necessarily make you liable for someone that breaks it apart.
Now, if your product was a security software, and you advertised it to supposedly prevent this...
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
Or even news?
What happens if kids break into your house and break your dishes? You sue their parents? You sue the school for not teaching them well? You sue the government for not putting enough money in education?
There is no logic to who gets sued. Suing is an interesting part of physics - whenever there is a "Lots of money" gradient, and a "Has worse Lawyers" gradient, the suing target moves.
Now I'll just be off suing microsoft for my latest virus. Brb.
This in my opinion is a major reason our society is so screwed up - why should we even consider it reasonable that lawyers can go after software engineers and programmers to "make someone pay" because the real criminals have no assets. Product liability insurance is a major reason why some things cost so much and until we break the cycle and get the lawyers out of control (most of them run our governments)these frivolous lawsuits will continue - in the end the only people that really win are the lawyers. This is the same argument as going after a Glock handgun designer because one of their weapons was used to shoot someone - its absurdity to the max
remembered the movie 'Runaway'? Cynthia Rhodes was hot then.
But she wasn't sued because the rest of the movie sucked.
Most software licenses have waivers of liability, and have a limit on the monetary damages. The limit is usually the purchase cost of the software. So, you can get a refund, and that's it. The only place I see that isn't waived are safety-critical applications, like medical devices, nuclear devices, vehicles, and factory floors. These are typically hard real-time systems. Besides, you can always blame the owner for not patching the system! The "unlock your car or home from your iphone" apps really worry me.
because the legal system encourages profiteering over reparations. especially for the law firms. it is natural that these firms would use any excuse to have people sue other people for all kinds of bullshit.
Read radical news here
robot, so the charges ought to be dropped. Right officer?
1. Manufacturers will very likely isolate their product from function, only selling unprogrammed tools with APIs, to companies who resell the devices with an OS with strict functionality limitations, and DRM-like lockouts to isolate themselves from liability.
2. Companies will be careful in the beginning to set precedence that allows them to bypass such liability. Likely they'll create a set of manufactured "harm" scenarios, with honest but complicit victims with a vested interest in blocking most future lawsuits based on indirect liability.
Only once liability precedence has been set will the APIs open up on consumer tools from the major manufacturers. The court system may be insane in many ways - but they function to the needs of large companies - mostly as a negotiation device, and a filter for amount of money owned ("You must be this rich to use the court system").
Ryan Fenton
But programming has been around long enough that 1) I am sure there is an instance of this already and 2) There have been plenty instances of bad things occurring already that it should have happened if it was going to.
This article could potentially give Dr. Forrester some bad ideas...Joel already has enough to deal with!
-Crow T. Robot
Yes, and lets sue car manu's for making cars that can kill people.
Or gun makers since guns kill people.
Or the president, since he's, well, in charge.
I'm suing slashdot for these crappy articles.
Seriously, wtf is wrong here? I know it's sunday, but is this really news?
Be seeing you...
Microsoft got ever sued for the damaged caused by the thousands of virus/botnets/trojans/intrusions caused by the "security" of their software? Not even got hit for delaying applying patches for known or being exploited vulnerabilities ever.
Yes it is the CEO or Engineering director they should go after. We had a boss who was insistent that we did not waste money getting our equipment tested by an external body for electrical safety, until he was informed that he was the person that could go to prison if some died as a result.
I'm going to sue God for creating me nearsighted, overweight and socially awkward.
If there's someone that will pay them for doing so, then sure, they may try. But why single out robots when there's already a device in most peoples' homes that is already being hacked for malevalent purposes? When is the last time anyone has brought a suit against Dell (and it went anywhere) because someone's computer was hacked/infected with malware and started acting as part of a botnet?
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Yes, this is the real issue.
Software will not become more reliable until businesses start to value reliability, and they will not until the risk of liability becomes large and widespread.
As more and more of our lives depend on software, 99% reliability is no longer enough. A time will come when there will be a backlash against unreliable programmed devices, and litigation will be a part of this. At that time, organizations will have to entirely revise the way that they build their software, adopting methods and technologies that enhance reliability. At the present time, reliability is an after-thought. This is not sustainable. If every device in one's environment has 99% reliability and one uses 1000 devices every day, then something will always be failing.
Simply have human operators responsible for "monitoring" the robots. They take all the liability if something goes wrong.
After all, that's why (largely autonomous) light rail / subway trains pay college students / poor people / etc. to sit in the cab and hold the "door open" button for the train.
Probably also why we'll never have fully automated cars and passenger aircraft as well. Easiest to just blame the driver / pilot / etc. for failing to handle the situation appropriately. Or at least they're their to cast doubt on the court cases, as in how Toyota insists that drivers are just confusing the brake and the gas pedals with the runaway throttle problem.
Simply doesn't make sense for any company to allow themselves to be held fully liable for any fully automated product they sell, when they can shift / share the blame with some kind of operator.
Subj.
Also, I'm lodging a complaint against you for disturbing my mental balance by insinuating that suing random entities is somehow NOT good. Prepare to pay me ONE BILLION DOLORS!
Does the door locks engineer or company get sued cause a burglar picked the lock? I don't think so.
Business will not value reliability until consumers will start so.
Not all, but most consumers will choose lower price to slightly higher reliability. My stuff doesn't have to be 100% reliable - stuff breaks, I replace it; if it breaks in the first year or two, then I get a free replacement due to warranty laws in EU; so why should I choose to pay more for vague promises of higher reliability?
also the autopilot does not work well when things go wrong and that when you need some there ask any pilot about that.
Really all of our national foundations seem to have been compromised by wiseguys who have figured out how to game the systems. Our legal system has become the weapon of choice for robbery by lawyers and our economy has been trashed by bankers and Wall-Streeters who have turned that system into a mega Rube Goldberg machine that nobody can figure out.
You build a product that might possibly injure somebody, you buy insurance. But if the product does injure somebody, they can't sue your insurance company. Heavens to Betsy, some juror might find out that an insurance company is really the defendant! Can't have that, juries are dumb! We'll make them sue the programmers or engineers. We'll have some stooge geek sitting in the dock, and we'll pretend through the entire trial that the engineer is really going to be personally liable for paying the verdict instead of our insurance company.
I am not talking about something physically breaking. I am talking about something not working right when you need it to. Software glitches, such as a device freezing and needing to be restarted, or losing all of your data.
Instead of locking the punks up, make them pay the victim 7 times the value of the damaged property. Deny them welfare until they've paid it back. If they commit another felony while they're still paying it off, double the sentence for that felony.
On the surface, it may sound harsh, but if they do $1000 of damage to their neighbor and the court makes them pay back $7,000 as restitution and punishment instead of booking them in the pokey for two years, which is less disruptive? Having to pay back $7,000 with no interest at 1-2x minimum wage or doing prison time and then trying to find a job?
If this is a likely scenario then where are all the people suing Microsoft because Windows let hackers install malicious code which deleted data. This happens frequently and yet I'm not aware of MS getting sued.
There is the inconvenience factor. If your cheap device breaks how long it is before you get a replacement? What if it fails in such a way to cause damage - the cheap laptop replacement power supplies from china for example. 10 euro gizmo versus the cost of a life or a house?
The problem is real for the manufacturers. But there may still be a significant question remaining whether programming provides a service or creates a product. The liability differences between the two are great.
The discerning customer already does care about reliability of software. Look at the various prices you can pay for PVRs for example, the forums are full of complaints about the cheapo ones crashing and the expensive ones less so.
Another example is on aircraft. Have you ever been on a long-haul flight where the entertainment system is off or the telephone/Internet system does not work? In these cases the airline has a policy not to reset a system while in flight. They kick up a hell of a fuss about this as they lose revenue. The software has to be reliable as a simple reboot is not possible.
Programmers program. Engineers design. And the manufacturer of the robot would be no more likely to be sued than Ford would if the kids had smashed in the side of the house with a stolen Taurus.
If the kids had found a Sawzall in the basement and used it to trash the house do you think the homeowner could hold Milwaukee Electric Tool liable?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Hu Jintao is on his way to Washington this week. The US and Chinese governments are basically married to each other at this point, whether they like it or not. And that marriage is built upon one thing: Western investment in a few big machines, operated by a bunch of small Chinese workers, and fed with resources extracted at gunpoint by the US military.
Personal robots would screw up that dynamic entirely.
That's the reason you see this constant droning fear-mongering bullshit about robot rights and robot liability and robot insurance from the US media-military-industrial complex. It isn't about safety or risk or even protecting American jobs. It's about protecting the incompetent globalist dipshits at the big banks who are selling out America to placate their hard-ons for centralized economic planning and production and a massive despotic government that confiscates the country's wealth just to dole it out to them via interest on their phony money and bail-outs of their stupid investments. It's about propping-up a means of economic production that is decidedly un-American, anti-middle-class and, in the long run, utterly self-destructive.
Seriously, who do you really think will be responsible when, instead of building you things and saving you money and keeping you from buying any more disposable consumer junk from the big-box stores and enabling you to retire and pay off your mortgage early, your household robot goes berserk and breaks all your china?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Well, if we can extort money from God with our lawyers, then you're right.
People have already been killed by robots 30 years ago, so it isn't exactly a new thing that robots can do harm. Also why shouldn't the companies be liable? If you build something that is dangerous enough to do serious harm and sell it to lay persons, you better make sure that it has enough build in safety mechanisms and doesn't just go crazy because some script kiddy came along and wanted to have some fun.
If one always can move for the one creating the system i would guess that MS would be a good target.. It's not that often a hacker is catched.. But MS can always be found..
1 A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2 A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3 A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
4 A robot must not make a mess and if it does it must clear up after itself.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
It is highly unlikely that the programmers or manufacturer of the original device would be liable. There are two main reasons. First, the wrongdoing of the hackers is almost certainly a superseding cause of the damage, which negates liability for negligence on the part of the programmers or manufacturer. Second, the product was not defective when it was sold and it was modified from its original condition, both of which negate products liability.
The law is stupid sometimes, but it is not that stupid.
Autopilots have a hard time dealing with situations that are not previously imagined, but don't underestimate how much the engineers can plan for, and the usefulness of an autopilot that can react far faster (and more calmly) than a human.
That said, having a person on-hand is a good idea anyway, out of the basic principal of having no single point of failure for a system.
Also, people fail sometimes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_flight_into_terrain
They would have to make a law that states "All executable code must be 100% flawlessly perfect and represented as such" and modify the EULA to say that first. Somehow I don't see that happening.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Maybe take one more step: allow robots to own assets, and have them pay taxes? That way you do not have to go after the programmers.
Every droid his/her own bank account.... That would be interesting. (hers will probably be bigger than his)
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
Industries that have failed or may fail that face the same problem as this post include Aviation (they gained some protection from Congress via the 1984 GARA act), Education (teachers have to make their plans dumbed down for all, cut field trips due to liability issues, etc), Medicine (the cost of medical care is high because of the liability costs for valid care that somebody may have got a different opinion on).
The American Tort Reform Association has a good short writeup on the Impacts on the Economy due to current Tort laws.
It's only a matter of time until it comes to programming/computers.
Yes, this is exactly the case. We have similar situations in aeronautical engineering: If I'm an engineer working for an aircraft company and I make a mistake and put a flaw into the design of an aircraft, and if that flaw ends of causing a crash and killing people, I am not liable. The company I work for is because I don't sign my name to the design and, generally, I have no control over testing that might have been able to uncover the flaw. That is, unless I'm a licensed Professional Engineer. In that case I do sign my name to the design and I do become liable. I had a professor in college who would always go over this point in one of his classes.
There has occasionally been talk about licensing software engineers and I've always tried to raise this issue when it comes up. As software engineers, we're often slave to the schedules and product requirements coming from management. I've been on any number of projects that started out with great intentions, planning to do code reviews and testing of every line of code. But as schedules slip, guess what's the first things to be thrown out of the development process?
So wealthy crooks can laugh off their sentences? It's hard enough to get a conviction against the rich with their teams of expensive lawyers, and you'd want to make it so that should they actually lose, it can all go away with some tiny check?
Also, what do you mean, "deny them welfare"? Are you one of those ancient conservatives who still rails against "Welfare Queens"? That system was eliminated in 96. Or do you mean welfare in a more general sense, like food stamps and disability insurance? In that case, you're basically suggesting that if an unemployed or handicapped person commits a crime, they should be thrown out on the streets to starve to death. Even ignoring the sheer inhumanity of such a system, don't you think it might lead to more crimes being committed in desperation?
I'm all for using finding ways to reduce the non-violent prison population, but not ones that disproportionately punish the poor.
The victim does not care for the justness of punishment meted out to the perps. They want compensation, only when compensation is impossible they will settle for revenge. So the plaintiff does not seek it either.
The defendant would rather walk away free and let some one else bear the loss. So they will actively collude with the plaintiff in finding grounds for shifting the liability to someone else with deep pockets. So the defendant does not seek it either.
Our legal system is not designed with a Solomon-mode that deliver justice over the objections and obstructions of both the plaintiff and the defendant.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
That's as it should be. If you're doing something dangerous, you need to take responsibility for it.
When I ran a DARPA Grand Challenge team, we took out a really good commercial liability policy. We had hardware stall timers, an electromagnet in the accelerator system that had to be energized to get out of idle, a separate battery and relay system which slammed on the brakes if the stall timer tripped, a backup anti-collision radar system, and a separate emergency stop radio link which had to send a signal once a second to keep the thing going. Unlike some teams, we never hit anything. (There was one team which had their vehicle run away when they filled their disk with log files and their application crashed. Not good.)
Sorry, nobody sues Ford or G.M. if some fool tampers with the engine or brakes on your car.
Home owners are currently *not* covered by fire insurance if they leave 'appliances'
on while away from home. This demonstrates that the onus is on the home owner to
make sure their 'vacuum cleaner' and computer are stowed properly.
This is just another example of how people think regular laws, that already
apply to the use of machines in the commission of crime, somehow don't apply
because the new 'excavator', with a video
camera bolted on, now has four hydraulic booms instead of one.
Throw out your 'Terminator' DVDs, it's just a lawn mower with an expert system running.
10 points for imagination though.
In america society, instead in "in our society"
There is, however, a huge difference, in terms of development costs, between reasonably reliable and 100% mathematically proven reliable. The latter would result in a PVR no normal person could afford, with little real benefit.
The company that I work for, which I shall not name, is a Fortune 500 company. There is a lot of money there. Because of this, everything they do, and I do mean everything, is vetted by one of the legal teams to minimize liability.
When I was going through one of the training classes, it was pretty much explained that way. If we have something delivered, and the company that we hire to do the delivery causes some damage to the client's site, we're the better target for a lawsuit because we have more money than Delivery Service X. So, we have rules and regulations regarding who can do deliveries for us. It's to show that we've taken due care in assuring that the people we hire are safe.
You can't necessarily prevent getting sued, but you can take steps to minimize your chance of losing and you can take steps to minimize your liability in case you do lose.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
That is why they cost more. Both versions can make it to market by passing the governing body test suite and from experience this is far from adequate. I would hope to see more testing and beta trials for the more expensive version. I would never pursue 100% reliablity and did not say so in the post.
Until software companies and programmers get sued software will not significantly improve. That is why I say there is no such thing as software engineering. Engineers get sued, programmers don't. They won't be true engineers until they have to carry malpractice insurance.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
As an attorney, reading this question invokes the same reactions that many of the /. crowd would have if I started trying to opine on the technical failings that would allow our mythical vandals to reprogram the hypothetical robot.
Not to get too technical, but just because you sue the company doesn't mean you win. The liability insurance that even the smallest companies carry would cover the legal costs of having such a suit dismissed. (For the technically inclined, look up comparative negligence and the proverbial "intervening bad actor").
The homeowner (the ones suing) would probably be found more responsible for not following basic security etc.
As others have pointed out, software companies have long been given practically a free ride in harm caused by poorly written software. First, they have been allowed to disclaim the standard warranties of fitness and function. This is akin to buying a car that the manufacturer won't promise to actually work or be safe. If Ford told you that they wouldn't guarantee that pressing the brake pedal actually engaged the brakes, would you drive that car? Yet every piece of commercial software we use specifically says that there is no promise that it will work at all, or do what the purchaser wants.
Here is a counter hypothetical (more realistic as it has actually happened). A relative dies in a plane crash. The FAA investigation conclusively shows that the accident was caused by a bug in one of the key computer systems. Should you sue: the airline? The manufacturer (boeing/airbus)? The subcontractor that wrote the software?
The answer is, you sue the airline, and the system is set up so that anything you win from them, they can then sue to recover from the party up the chain. Thus, everyone's liability is ultimately apportioned according to their degree of fault (note, yes it is a gross simplification). This is why people writing software for critical systems (ones where a failure can cause property damage or injury) need a good lawyer to write their contracts/licenses. They law has allowed programmers to avoid their responsibilties for a long time, so if a sw company doesn't take advantage of that, it is their own fault.
Consider, there is no educational or professional certification required to write and sell software that controls an infant incubator used in an NICU, but you need a government license to drive to the store. Programmers and engineers have been getting a sweet deal in liability for years, so it's awesome to hear them still complaining.
I'm a lawyer with excellent karma. Something's gotta be wrong.
Yeah, I've had some problems with my robot. He betrays me for money, he drinks, smokes and gambles. But still, he's my best friend. I don't think I'll be suing MomCorp.
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
Nothing's ever completely secure. You can "what if" all day and never, ever get one ounce closer to prevention. The hypothetical, war-driving "kids" will still wi-fi hack the hypothetical, bed-making/massage robot to suffocate grandpa in his sleep. There's no way around that. And unlike the telegraph and telephone networks, the international banking system and the internet, you have the opportunity to ask yourself: "is this an invention I even really NEED"? Because any and all of it can and, given all possibilities, WILL go wrong (one day). If you're concerned, genuinely concerned, that the national "robotic" labor pool could and will ever rise up and sick upheaval upon your uppity, sedentary, brainless and senseless, middle-to-upper class turd-maker, why don't you think twice about automating the task? I'm sure plenty of people, people very close to you, want to kick your fucking ass, already. Go make a real person out of yourself and make them do it.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Wait, is he claiming robots will suddenly make software have more real world consequences? If so, I'd like to introduce him to Therac-25... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
Short, not too squeamish version: Software bug in rare cases allowed radiation overdoses. People died.
Bernie Madoff scammed $50B. Under a punitive restitution system, he and his conspirators would be looking at $350B in damages.
Obviously, they could never pay that much off. That's part of the point. He and his family will be left utterly ruined for the rest of their lives for such a great financial harm.
Credit travels upwards, blame travels downwards. That's the way it works.
- Pointy-Haired Boss.
My last electric shaver had a warning on it: "WARNING: No not insert this product into any orifice." I'm sure that robots in the future will come with entire books of lists of things not to do with them. Then if someone tries to sue the manufacturer, they can point to the list where the warning said not to do that and disclaim liability for the user failing to read the product documentation.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I was thinking about circumventing liability, but I suppose we could sue the Catholic Church for the charges brought against God
... That programmers have deep pockets?
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,
It's still an insurance company which responds in most cases, it's just the liability insurer of Toyota/the manufacturer (except certain very large companies who choose not to lease a balance sheet (ie transfer risk to a 3rd party insurer) such as BP - they self-insure, a consequence of which is that they do not accurately price risk internally).
/. wanted to know about insurance...
Often, a company like the imagined robot cleaner manufacturer will use many parts/systems designed by others, and it is standard practice to ensure such suppliers carry adequate insurance, as evidenced by a certificate of insurance. So let's say the robot contained a wireless subsystem made by someone else, and it was that subsystem which was the attack vector used by the hackers. The home owner would sue the robot manufacturer. The robot manufacturer's insurer would defend/settle the suit. The robot manufacturer's insurer would the pursue recovery from the subsystem manufacturer's insurer (this process is known as subrogation).
In my experience, when something goes wrong, inevitably the manufacturer is drawn into it. Common arguments are that the user wasn't notified of the risk (ie no warning label, or warning label not big enough, or the right color, or didn't include every remotely foreseeable circumstance), or that proper safety/countermeasures were not taken. I've seen plenty of cases that I find incredibly bizarre but juries do not.
Incidentally, the liability insurance typically pays defense costs, often in addition to any limit, and the protection from legal fees sometimes is more beneficial than the indemnity protection (ie it can cost a small fortune to extract oneself from even a suit with no merit).
Quite possibly more than anyone on
People are liable for whatever they dont exempt themselves from in the 40 pages of legalese you are automatically bound by the moment you come within 4 metres of the item in question
http://www.awfullybigmoustache.com
Does the author work for a law firm?
If there were anything to this at all, no EULA on Earth could protect Microsoft from liability lawsuits for damages done by virus writers ...
Investigator: Lifting Unit 753473, please show me on this bender doll where the programmer touched you.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
First off, if you deny someone on welfare, welfare how are they going to pay off the debt and live? Unless you expressly tell out what they can and cant do, but wait, isn't that what prisons already do?
Criminals who cause physical damage are rarely rich, if they were rich under this system they could walk all over poor people and just laugh off the costs. "Oh I'm so sorry I ran over your beloved German Shepard, here's $1200", then he hops into his BMW and gleefully runs over someone's lab.
But back to poor crims, they are typically violent criminals because they haven't got the money or brains to do anything else. So what do you propose to do when Billy Joe the Redneck cannot pay off his criminal debt. Well we could always bring back debt prisons but then you're back to square one.
Besides, if you start offering payouts to "victims of crime" backed by the government you'll have every crook and hustler coming out of the woodwork to make a claim.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The problem with that plan is people who commit minor burglaries are so messed up in their lives that it won't matter. As likely as not they already have thousands of dollars of debt that they'll never repay, so an extra $7000 is just a meaningless number.
I know one guy who's been in and out of jail 30 times or more over the years, and he has some random large number of debt. When he does get around to working, he always gets paid in cash, or he'll beg, or lift something from the store, or beg from his mom, or sell some drugs. If the judge told him he'd have to pay off some money instead of going to jail, he would come out laughing. At very worst he's delayed jail by that much longer.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Is it common knowledge among /. readers that the term robot comes from a book by a Czech author named Karel Capek (the C should have a little v shape above it making it sound like Chapek with the ch pronounced like in China) and comes from the Czech word robota which in that language means work?
They said these house robots were all 3 laws compliment, yet it seems every time a law firm tries to sue one of these robot companies most of the staff dies from "accidents".
Take Mr. Jenkins. Not one day after he filed suit against "US Robotics" wouldn't you know they found him in bed with his skull caved in by a frying pan. Apparently in what the technicians are calling a "glitch" the robot confused his head for the dishwasher.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
well, you'd have to provide them the means to earn 7000$, so you'd need to find someone willing to pay that minimum pay. if you deny them welfare after putting them in a debt-lock, then you're missing the whole point of welfare, which is to keep people from going all haiti-let's-fuck'-everything-up, which they will do(after few starve to death).
if it was just that easy to get money from people who don't have money, shopkeepers would be using extra-easy-shatter glass.
being responsible personally for code you've turned out wouldn't fit well with the companies, they'd need to give the credit for the lines to whoever did them and possibly ownership.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Why would they be liable?
You're fairly nieve. This exact concept is what has destroyed light aviation in much of the world. Example, pilot, in small plane, flies into clouds, without training, and crashes into a tower. Reasonable people say this is the pilot's fault. Owners of tower are without service and so they sue. Turns out they are not happy with the insurance of the pilot so they also sue the pilot's instructors, airplane manufacturer, the engine manufacturer, the tire manufacturer, the prop manufacturer, and the mechanics who last annual'ed the aircraft. And that's the short list.
Its widely estimated that half of all aviation costs are directly and indirectly attributed to legal liability suits and insurance premiums. Think about that for a second. Now ponder the absolute greed and massive stupidity which is required to allow such a thing to happen. Remember, it wasn't that long ago that a new plane could be purchased for the cost of a low end luxury car. These days that will only get you into the used market. In doing so, lawyers have literally destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs.
America is literally one of the most litigious places on Earth. We elect lawyers who then create idiotic laws who primarily and secondarily only benefit other lawyers. Absolutely do not under estimate both the stupidity and greed of the masses; nor the greed and desire of lawyers to lie, manipulate, and generally misrepresent to said masses.
One of the biggest dangers America has ever faced is lawyers.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who read it like that ("wouldn't robots inspire programmers way the frack more than the average suit would likely be inspired by one?")
Not that anyone cares, but I'm already in print about this: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/is/2010/00000011/00000002/art00003 or get it here http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/~jjb/web/ai.html I actually argued that this process will be an important part of keeping robotics companies from overselling their products, and in fact the issue will be underselling to escape liability, so there will need to be consumer information dissemination about it.