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Who's Liable For Decisions AI and Robotics Make? (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader shares a BetaNews article: Reuters news agency reported on February 16 that "European lawmakers called [...] for EU-wide legislation to regulate the rise of robots, including an ethical framework for their development and deployment and the establishment of liability for the actions of robots including self-driving cars." The question of determining "liability" for decision making achieved by robots or artificial intelligence is an interesting and important subject as the implementation of this technology increases in industry, and starts to more directly impact our day to day lives. Indeed, as application of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning technology grows, we are likely to witness how it changes the nature of work, businesses, industries and society. And yet, although it has the power to disrupt and drive greater efficiencies, AI has its obstacles: the issue of "who is liable when something goes awry" being one of them. Like many protagonists in industry, Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are trying to tackle this liability question. Many of them are calling for new laws on artificial intelligence and robotics to address the legal and insurance liability issues. They also want researchers to adopt some common ethical standards in order to "respect human dignity."
I don't think anyone has ever considered this issue. Ever.
This programmer defines what the robot should do; when it should be done; how it should be done & for how long.
Why is this even debatable?
and I've been calling for professional licensing and liability for software engineers for at least 30 years. That should follow the approach for other Professional Engineers, including the use of 'engineering practices' as a defense.
The software community has done an appallingly shitty job with software reliability. (Exhibit 1: CERT database of software vulnerabilities.) It's way past time they get held accountable. And yeah, this will slow things down and require people do things right the first time, and it will put a serious dent in the management approach to "throw the cheapest bodies at the software problem, and damn the bugs!" Product liability needs to include both corporate and individual liability.
Is the negligent act a result of its normal use? Was it negligent design or programming? Are there any other possibilities?
Simple then- the person or legal entity to whom the use was a benefit, or the designer/programmer.
In the end this kind of stuff is going to be regulated by the governments that have jurisdiction over them. The governments will also likely set the standards to allow for AI to come enter into an area where liability is an issue.
For example, fully autonomous cars will be regulated in the US by each State's Department of Motor Vehicles and perhaps the Federal Department of Transportation. So if they're going to regulate and set standards, then they should be liable when an AI meets those standards but causes an accident.
Of course, the idea of governments being liable for this kind of thing should terrify anyone.
Robotics have been with us for more than half a century.
Contracts between the AI software vendor and the product manufacturer can establish the legal minutia, but apart from that liability falls squarely on the provider of the product.
Next stupid question?
In my microwaves taking my picture.
In my robots doing sick/bad things.
SAD!
you know the answer already
Whoever stood to benefit from the action of the AI should be liable for what it did while acting on their behalf.
AI is just another tool or machine. You can use a hammer to frame a house for a poor family, or to smash a car window to steal someone's laptop. Either way it isn't Estwing's fault. If there is a material breach of contract from the seller of an AI product to you, existing law covers you nicely. Same with deceptive marketing practices.
This is a stupid question and I'm tired of seeing it. Only people who think AI is magic pixie dust instead of a software program are capable of asking it.
Who is responsible for buggy software sending spam to the world? Granted, the damage may be less than an autonomous truck going through the local farmers market.
civil vs criminal as well. Where things are different.
And in a criminal case they can't hide under an NDA or EULA
With a union and a real trade school system.
A lot of CS professors have been in the ivory tower for way to long and have very little real work place know how on the workings of IT / codeing.
The people who designed and tested the AI.
What is so novel about that?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
What do you mean by AI in this context?
Robots and software are just that, and we already have rules and laws in place for who is liable for what they do based on many factors.
(Usually the manufacturer, unless the end-user can make modifications, in which case the end-user insofar as those modifications, where the rest lies between end-user and manufacturer. Go look up the laws)
If an AI is made and reaches an advanced enough point we collectively deem it should be given personhood, then again we have laws in place for just such a thing.
Generally the parents or legal guardian, so in this case the owner? We are still far away from that point in reality, but if you want to talk "in the future" then you should start with the tipping point of assigning personhood and go with any changes to those existing rules first.
I wouldn't even worry now about the issue of an AI having personhood that has reached a point of being responsible for its own actions as an autonomous entity.
Worry about that after you figure out the personhood issues, unless you just want to ponder on it as a mental exercise.
Clearly using anything similar to a humans age and time spent developing isn't going to be a perfect fit, but other than defining some threshold to cross, the details of who would be responsible just don't matter now.
Arguably defining personhood for an AI doesn't matter right now either, but sure go ahead and work out what the line is so we have more to offer the AI than just "no, you are my property" if you want to ease any concern of an AI taking the state of personhood by force all on its own if it makes you sleep better.
You could do worse than start with all the pie in the sky futurist writings that are not fully in the realm of scifi that have been around since the 1950s.
Primary liability for a robot's actions are with the owner... Case closed....
Now, the owner may have a liability claim with the maintainer, installer and/or manufacturer should the robot not function as designed, but that's another case.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
It will be like the limited liability of the companies. The CEO and management will get bonus or golden handshakes, the workers will suffer. In the case of robotic failure the workers will be the office clerks instead of the usual factory workers.
The elected politician or judge or senior executive who approved the use of the category of technology in the category of application in which the problem occurred is who ought to be responsible.
Software, specially self-learning AI software, is too complex and unpredictable (in details of operation in every case).
Careful programming and testing cannot cover the range of possibilities, because input data and system state are too (combinatorially) complex.
It's the senior decision maker who ways the risks and benefits and approves or allows, who is responsible.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"decision maker who weighs the risks"
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Who's liable for decisions an employee makes? Seems like the same thing to me.
... for the actions of their pets. The owner.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
There's medication available for your condition.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
At least, that's what the battalions of lawyers will argue.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'm pretty sure there's a QA intern that works here who can be liable.
The operator if it is non-autonomous, the legal owner if it is autonomous but still legally considered property, or the AI itself if it is legally a person.
And with the courts settling ambiguous cases according to the laws of their jurisdiction and the arguments of both parties.
Just like every other thing to ever exist.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/robot-killed-woman-wanda-holbrook-car-parts-factory-michigan-ventra-ionia-mains-federal-lawsuit-100-a7630591.html
Robot 'goes rogue and kills woman on Michigan car parts production line'
Machine should not have been able to reach 57-year-old mother-of-three but somehow managed to load a trailer attachment assembly part on top of her, lawsuit claims
Every permutation of possibilities for say an automated 3 ton car driving at speed in the massive complexity of the unpredictable open world without ever having any accidents, simply cannot even be anticpated let alone exhaustively planned-for/tested, therefore cannot realistically ever be the fault of Engineers.
The only sane approach is to require full cover insurance for each robot in the wild. Let the market itself determine the actual usage of robots based on the trade-offs between total costs (including probably very expensive cover-everything insurance) vs potential savings/perceived benefits.
it makes no sense to argue exactly who will buy the insurace (i.e. manufacturer, supplier or end-user) since its cost will ultimately be borne by the end user anyway.
The people who designed and tested the AI.
What is so novel about that?
Welcome to earth, but I'm sorry to report Microsoft will invade your planet RSN.
You obviously didn't read your EULA covering your new AI robot. You don't own anything and whatever goes bad, the badness is NOT the fault of "the people who designed and tested the AI". When you signed the lease or whatever to use the monster, you agreed they are all innocent.
Liability is such a quaint old idea. You wouldn't want to bankrupt Microsoft by holding the company liable for all the damages caused by their little mistakes. After all, no one is perfect. Of course, these days it isn't just Microsoft, but EVERY humongous and "successful" company has to protect its "maximized shareholder value" from the pesky peasants who might get injured or killed by those little mistakes.
No one is perfect, and inhuman corporations are the least perfect of all.
What are they liable for? Who's liable?
Absolutely nuttin' and absolutely no one.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Isaac Asimov, for improperly formulating the three laws of robotics. If he'd gotten them right, none of this would be necessary.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
"They also want researchers to adopt some common ethical standards in order to "respect human dignity."
Does anyone else find it weird, dirty, dishonest, sleezy, ironic that a politician, a leader of people and a decider of policies and laws that have real effects on people, call for others to adopt ethical standards to "respect human dignity?"
Politicians respecting human dignity. That's a first for me.
unless the owner can prove that the mistake was by victim, operator or coder/manufacturer.
Think of a car. The responsibility falls on the owner in most cases unless proven otherwise. Same with a gun. Same with most machines. We have processes for these things in place. In time, safety measures in dealing with robots will become a standard procedure to protect both the owner and everyone who is in contact with said robot. Violation of safety or failure to uphold safety measures will determine fault. Just like we have roads, licensure, insurance, classes, etc. for cars, we'll create a process that ensures safety to the best of our ability and proceed down a line of reasoning starting with the owner/supervisor, then operator, then victim, then manufacturer/manufacturer employee.
How do we come up with guidelines? First logic, then trial and error.
Now when we add consciousness to a robot we'll need to have a a much deeper conversation about sentient beings rights, the use of punishment as a means of justice, and how we punish something that cant really feel pain. Pull the plug? Scrap and recycle? Little electric shocks? Program limiting? What about restitution? Do robots have a right to their own wages? If they work, do they have the right to pursue other interests besides what the owner intended? Can a sentient robot be fired or just reprogrammed? Is reprogramming a sentient being a violation of its rights? How about destruction upon creation of a new model? What about AI that don't have a physical presence but a vast digital one? How do we deal with those issues?
Do robots have the right to life (electricity), liberty (internet connection), and the pursuit of... overclocking their pleasure centers?
I was thinking about a career change, so I went to my old college's career office. Law seemed like an idea so I started browsing magazines like "American Lawyer", and I found an issue where Artificial Intelligence was the big story.
I started reading. The reason AI was interesting, according to these lawyers, was that there was division of responsibility between various independent organizations involved in creating, deploying, and using AI products. Therefore there were interesting and novel areas of research into division of liability when an accident or failure occurred.
I put the magazine back on the rack, left the office and never thought about being a lawyer again.
Avoidance: I built my own car from scratch with nothing but hand tools! It took me 20 years!
Respecting risks: I built a robotic assembly line that produces 50 cars a day. I must observe, and be aware that this is a very dangerous piece of tech, and be sure my employees understand that they are paid handsomely to do the same while working near it.
Other: My assembly line riveted my hands to my widget! It's not my fault, I never *REALLY* accepted the risks of automation....
Avoidance: I'll never trust a self driving car! Ever!
Respecting risks: I better keep an eye on road just in case....
Other: My husband was minding his own business, taking his morning nap on the way to work....
Avoidance: Moving stairs?! Witchcraft! I'll take the "real" stairs!
Respecting risks: I'll just be sure my shoes are tied correctly, and maybe keep an eye on those scary bits on the ends......
Other: My little girl had such beautiful long hair before she decided to nap on the escalator....
Respecting risks: The system goes online August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug......
Avoidance: August 29, 1997, came and went. Nothing much happened. Michael Jackson turned 40. There was no Judgment Day.....
Other: Die slow, MF......
Respecting risks: Sir, the policing capacity of a cybernetic officer far outweighs the risks that he or she may uncover the far reaching conspiracy our company may or may not be involved in...
Avoidance: I'm sorry Mrs. Murphy, we did everything we could. Your husband died a hero...
Other: PLEASE PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPON. YOU HAVE 20 SECONDS TO COMPLY.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Why on earth would The Who be liable? Oh, wait, it's a question, not a statement.
Do you have ESP?
Human and dignity are not words that go well together. Human's are on the nasty side and tend to ruin all that surrounds them. A person has a natural right to expect that any device follows designs and safety rules that industry leaders use to keep people safe. no system will ever be perfect and anything meaningful will have built in error potential just like a brand new and expensive tire can explode and cause the death of numerous people. But when we allow insurance companies and other third party wallet vampires to get into any affair it tends to create more problems than it solves.
Humans have no dignity. If they had they would not procreate like rabbits and bear voiceless the heavy burden put on them by their overlords.
and the corporate executives that runs the company and the stock holders
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Same question as who's liable for decision pets make. When your dog escape from the house and makes a carnage in a nearby kindergarten, you are liable. If you feel you're not cut to control things you own so that it doesn't get out of control, don't buy a dog nor a robot.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
they follow an exact set of instructions and it will follow these exact instructions every time it comes to the same situation.
compared with perception and semantic understanding of general external environment.
I'm talking about functional self-awareness here (i,e, behaviour indicating self-awareness) not the consciousness hard-problem (qualia).
A "feeling" of self-awareness is not necessary for functional behaviour due self awareness. Whether a feeling would emerge is a separate question, not that important because we can't prove that we ourselves have it. We only assume that other people are not zombies because it's a simpler supposition to assume they are the same'ish in qualia perception to us. That's an assumption, probably correct, but entirely unprovable.
Functional self-awareness behaviour is behaviour of the system caused by information-processing of the relationship of indformation/symbols standing for
- one's physical self (body/parts)
- one's ideas (information-processing explorations of stored information representing the world and abstractions of it)
- one's sequences of focusses of attention
to information/symbols representing things out in the world.
In other words it is second-order (or higher-order) reasoning (aka meta reasoning).
Again, nothing specially harder about implementation of that in computers compared to implementation of learners/reasoners solely about the aspects of the external-to-self world.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
In the aviation world, the FAA is the final design authority, yet has no liability when they either approve a design that is faulty, require by regulation that a design be flawed, or when they prevent through regulation or delay a safety improvement.
Not corporations; they exist to spend other people's money and avoid all responsibility. As the GFC revealed, they have achieved perfection.
We already have laws for equipment failure and duty of care (at a distance), so the issue is unforeseeable consequences from correct behaviour. Remember the talking car in 'Knight rider'? Leaving aside the human personality, it's harm minimization rules were absolute: Anything that increased risk to its passengers, except magically travelling over rural roads at 400 mph, was avoided. In the story, a few times the driver had to override the car because doing something half-successful was better than doing nothing. Will robot cars of the future have an override feature and joystick? (A steering wheel that will be used once in a lifetime, takes too much space.) Should the car know if passengers are licenced to operate a joystick-controlled car?
I see no difference between designing calipers for brakes and putting them in a car or designing AI and putting it in a car. If the brakes are installed correctly but the calipers don't stop the car, the driver is not held liable. Likewise with AI. The manufacturer has sold the car with it, barring any kind of outside force the manufacturer had no control over, the manufacturer should be responsible for what happens. If 2 billion lines of code is too advanced for you to certify as safe, then don't certify it and don't put it in a car. It's that simple.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Only in the case of K9
or the maker. in choices unless you have insurance(which may be required) the owner the maker may make/have disclaimers where it is not software bugs.
Doooooooooooooooo !
As far as I know, EU parliament has no power here. This will be one more non-binding resolution.
But at least, I assume it is better than nothing that some people work on that problem.
Think about reality for a few minutes:
If, for example, two "self-driving" mode cars are in a collision that kills all of the occupants, who is at fault?
Why would anyone think otherwise?
Machine should not have been able to reach 57-year-old mother-of-three but somehow managed to load a trailer attachment assembly part on top of her, lawsuit claims...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/robot-killed-woman-wanda-holbrook-car-parts-factory-michigan-ventra-ionia-mains-federal-lawsuit-100-a7630591.html
I read one proposal which suggested that liability insurance might be bundled with autonomous vehicles as a marketing tool. Or perhaps an optional feature like leather seats & a sun roof. That seems like a really good idea to me. It would certainly answer this question about who is responsible for an accident. As a selling point, it would make expensive autonomous vehicles extremely attractive to drivers considered to be "high risk" by insurance companies. For someone with multiple accidents & a DUI, insurance could be as much as $5,000 per year. Even more for a young driver. Putting $400/month into a car payment instead of an insurance payment would obviously allow a person to finance a much more expensive car.
We should blame all of it on Alan Turing and make him responsible for all liability. Eventually, whatever company creates a rogue AI or robot, it will likely be just as dead.
CowboyNeal
Why has no one thought of the obvious and correct answer?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
"As horrible as each of these stories is, there is nothing that shows that Mr. Cadden did something that the government can link to the death of that person."
There are many example of cases where a corporation kills people, but, magically, no one person is found guilty of murder, when it was clearly murder.
Oh, I guess it's nobody, because it was done in the context of a business!
We have to solve that problem first. And the question doesn't change just because you add "with robots" or "with technology".
Pretty sure you're an AI trolling us.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?