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Who's Responsible When Your Semi-Autonomous Shopping Bot Purchases Drugs Online?
Nerval's Lobster writes Who's responsible when a bot breaks the law? A collective of Swiss artists faced that very question when they coded the Random Darknet Shopper, an online shopping bot, to purchase random items from a marketplace located on the Deep Web, an area of the World Wide Web not indexed by search engines. While many of the 16,000 items for sale on this marketplace are legal, quite a few are not; and when the bot used its $100-per-week-in-Bitcoin to purchase a handful of illegal pills and a fake Hungarian passport, the artists found themselves in one of those conundrums unique to the 21st century: Is one liable when a bunch of semi-autonomous code goes off and does something bad? In a short piece in The Guardian, the artists seemed prepared to face the legal consequences of their software's actions, but nothing had happened yet—even though the gallery displaying the items is reportedly next door to a police station. In addition to the drugs and passport, the bot ordered a box set of The Lord of the Rings, a Louis Vuitton handbag, a couple of cartons of Chesterfield Blue cigarettes, sneakers, knockoff jeans, and much more.
It's not okay, but it wouldn't be murder either. It would be manslaughter.
I think you are over complicating this. Use the analogy of a bridge. The bridge is designed to allow people to pass over it, and if it's designed properly it will allow people to pass over it. If the bridge collapses it becomes a question of was the bridge built properly was it checked to see if it would fail before hand was it built according to the original plan. If there is a design flaw someone(typically the engineer who stamped the documents) can be held liable.
I think the same could be said here. If the design was flawed in that it bought illegal things that's one thing when it's suppose to be searching say amazon. Here I would question it's design because it was designed to buy things from where it did. In the design there was a decent chance it could hit illegal materials, and it did. I think if they didn't build anything to compensate for that it's on them. It's like asking, is it really assault if you close your eyes and start swinging at the air and just happen to hit people?
also where's the originality http://xkcd.com/576/
It's not okay, but it wouldn't be murder either. It would be manslaughter.
That depends. If you should have known the gun would have a significant chance of hitting someone, you could well be facing a full murder charge. Randomly shooting a gun in a field in the country? Probably manslaughter. Doing the same in a crowded shopping mall? Yep, that'd be murder. Likewise this bot was shopping randomly on a darknet that has a lot of illegal stuff for sale, and the creator would (absolutely should have, anyways) have known that, which means he would be legally liable for the purchases (if the government decided to press the issue).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Can you prove that your teenage kid is sentient and fully autonomous? :) And at what age does this happen?
Actually that an interesting question
Well....
Yes. It's called mens rea. And it depends on where you live, in some cases it's 9 years old in Canada it's 12 years old. That's the legal definition of "sentient and fully autonomous" while knowing the difference between "right and wrong."
Om, nomnomnom...