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This cannot work as a practical matter. If a person is killed by a robot, it is important to have a legal theory to understand some analogue to "the responsibl

This cannot work as a practical matter. If a person is killed by a robot, it is important to have a legal theory to understand some analogue to "the responsible party". Otherwise, the introduction of a "robot" in the workflow becomes a wildcard to evade torts of all sorts.

Haga 7y ago
Eh, it already is. We call those legal golemns companies.
- markovbot 7y ago
  Which is a problem we should not just accept, but do something about.
landryraccoon 7y ago
If the goal of the legal theory is to reduce human deaths by robots, why not just reduce human deaths by robots by dismantling or repairing the appropriate robots? Again, the legal theory works because when dealing with human beings you have to assign responsibility to human beings. Hurricanes and earthquakes kill tons of human beings and there’s no legal theory of responsibility. We simply work as a society to minimize those deaths without blaming anyone.
- rout39574 7y ago
  You seem to be suggesting that a sufficiently complex system dissipates responsibility, transforms an act of engineering into an Act Of God. If that's not your intent, I suggest you rephrase. When a bridge (another system which is complex but tractable in principle) fails, we work hard to find the feature of the design that led to the failure, and if we decide it was negligence, we exact consequences. From current news: Should Boeing get a pass on their MCAS failures because "Gosh, it's really hard" ? The MCAS is a robot.
  - landryraccoon 7y ago
    Responsibility itself is a heuristic with a goal. As autonomous systems take on more and more responsibility, tracing back a historical cause will be less and less relevant than actually fixing the fault in the system. Take Boeing for example. Assigning blame to individuals, while rewarding, may not be as effective as changing the system that allows Boeing to continue to act the way it does. Boeing scapegoats, fires some people (which may include the CEO) but the organization, and the nation and legal system that sustains it continues largely unchanged. You’re trying to patch by punishing humans individually, while ignoring faults in the system we have collectively created. Our instinct is to assign blame because historically and evolutionarily harm is usually done by individual humans, and punishing humans is a good heuristic. But it does not seem to me that punishment does a good job of creating good large scale organizations or systems.

Haga 7y ago

Eh, it already is. We call those legal golemns companies.

markovbot 7y ago
Which is a problem we should not just accept, but do something about.

landryraccoon 7y ago

If the goal of the legal theory is to reduce human deaths by robots, why not just reduce human deaths by robots by dismantling or repairing the appropriate robots? Again, the legal theory works because when dealing with human beings you have to assign responsibility to human beings. Hurricanes and earthquakes kill tons of human beings and there’s no legal theory of responsibility. We simply work as a society to minimize those deaths without blaming anyone.

rout39574 7y ago
You seem to be suggesting that a sufficiently complex system dissipates responsibility, transforms an act of engineering into an Act Of God. If that's not your intent, I suggest you rephrase. When a bridge (another system which is complex but tractable in principle) fails, we work hard to find the feature of the design that led to the failure, and if we decide it was negligence, we exact consequences. From current news: Should Boeing get a pass on their MCAS failures because "Gosh, it's really hard" ? The MCAS is a robot.
- landryraccoon 7y ago
  Responsibility itself is a heuristic with a goal. As autonomous systems take on more and more responsibility, tracing back a historical cause will be less and less relevant than actually fixing the fault in the system. Take Boeing for example. Assigning blame to individuals, while rewarding, may not be as effective as changing the system that allows Boeing to continue to act the way it does. Boeing scapegoats, fires some people (which may include the CEO) but the organization, and the nation and legal system that sustains it continues largely unchanged. You’re trying to patch by punishing humans individually, while ignoring faults in the system we have collectively created. Our instinct is to assign blame because historically and evolutionarily harm is usually done by individual humans, and punishing humans is a good heuristic. But it does not seem to me that punishment does a good job of creating good large scale organizations or systems.