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The defense against this is to have very clear legal principles that identify the person or people fully accountable for the machine's decisions. Admittedly th

by elihu 2y ago

The defense against this is to have very clear legal principles that identify the person or people fully accountable for the machine's decisions. Admittedly this may result in some strange results if followed to its logical conclusion, like a product manager at a self-driving car company being the recipient of ten thousand traffic tickets.

Xmd5a 2y ago
>identify the person or people fully accountable for the machine's decisions. Which required more tech, not less.
- dartos 2y ago
  Not necessarily. Tbh I’m in favor of holding C-suite responsible for the actions of their company, unless the company has extremely clear bylaws regarding accountability. If, say, a health insurance provider was using an entirely automated claim review process that falsely denies claims, I think the C-level people should be responsible.
daveguy 2y ago
> product manager at a self-driving car company being the recipient of ten thousand traffic tickets. I'm the case of self driving cars, the company itself could be held liable. Everyone invested in the company who puts a bad product in the market should be financially impacted. The oligarchy we are heading for wants no accountability or oversight -- all profit, no penalty.
lenerdenator 2y ago
> The defense against this is to have very clear legal principles that identify the person or people fully accountable for the machine's decisions. Most legal principles are designed to reduce liability. That's the whole point of incorporation, for example.
- ajb 2y ago
  Incorporation is to reduce liability for debt. It's not supposed to reduce liability for criminal negligence. Or other criminal offences.
  - lenerdenator 2y ago
    At least in the US, there's precious little difference. If a company is found guilty of a crime, the C-suite isn't thrown in prison; they pay a fine. If a company is found to have committed a tort against a party, they pay damages. There are exceptions (the Volkswagen diesel scandal comes to mind) but generally both punishments entail paying out a monetary amount that is often lower than the profit generated by the crime, often because of tort reform or because of fine amounts that are out-of-date with current corporate revenues.
    - jjk7 2y ago
      There was one banker imprisoned for the 2008 financial crisis, but he was hardly responsible.
- dsr_ 2y ago
  No, legal principles are designed to specify liability.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    This. I'd go as far as to say that the law mostly tries to conserve liability, in the "energy conservation" sense. Once harm is defined and quantified, the consequences have to be discharged somewhere, and there's tons of rules that try to sensibly distribute them among parties involved, while counteracting everyones' attempts at diffusing liability or redirecting it somewhere else. On that note, after some time working in cybersec and GRC fields, I realized that cybersecurity is best understood in terms of liability management. This is what all the security framework certification and auditing is about, and this is a big reason security today is more about buying services from the right vendors and less about the hard tech stuff. Preventing a hack is hard. Making it so you aren't liable for the consequences is easier - and it looks like a network of companies interlinked with contracts that shift liability around. It's a kind of distributed meta-insurance (that also involves actual insurance, too).
DrillShopper 2y ago
> The defense against this is to have very clear legal principles that identify the person or people fully accountable for the machine's decisions. Be careful how hard you push for this - this is how the prosecutors in the Royal Mail fiasco drove postmasters out of business and drove a few to suicide.
- JTbane 2y ago
  That case was absolutely crazy, imagine getting accused of fraud and embezzlement just because of a computer bug.

by elihu 2y ago

Xmd5a 2y ago

>identify the person or people fully accountable for the machine's decisions. Which required more tech, not less.

dartos 2y ago
Not necessarily. Tbh I’m in favor of holding C-suite responsible for the actions of their company, unless the company has extremely clear bylaws regarding accountability. If, say, a health insurance provider was using an entirely automated claim review process that falsely denies claims, I think the C-level people should be responsible.

daveguy 2y ago

> product manager at a self-driving car company being the recipient of ten thousand traffic tickets. I'm the case of self driving cars, the company itself could be held liable. Everyone invested in the company who puts a bad product in the market should be financially impacted. The oligarchy we are heading for wants no accountability or oversight -- all profit, no penalty.

lenerdenator 2y ago

> The defense against this is to have very clear legal principles that identify the person or people fully accountable for the machine's decisions. Most legal principles are designed to reduce liability. That's the whole point of incorporation, for example.

ajb 2y ago
Incorporation is to reduce liability for debt. It's not supposed to reduce liability for criminal negligence. Or other criminal offences.
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  At least in the US, there's precious little difference. If a company is found guilty of a crime, the C-suite isn't thrown in prison; they pay a fine. If a company is found to have committed a tort against a party, they pay damages. There are exceptions (the Volkswagen diesel scandal comes to mind) but generally both punishments entail paying out a monetary amount that is often lower than the profit generated by the crime, often because of tort reform or because of fine amounts that are out-of-date with current corporate revenues.
  - jjk7 2y ago
    There was one banker imprisoned for the 2008 financial crisis, but he was hardly responsible.
dsr_ 2y ago
No, legal principles are designed to specify liability.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  This. I'd go as far as to say that the law mostly tries to conserve liability, in the "energy conservation" sense. Once harm is defined and quantified, the consequences have to be discharged somewhere, and there's tons of rules that try to sensibly distribute them among parties involved, while counteracting everyones' attempts at diffusing liability or redirecting it somewhere else. On that note, after some time working in cybersec and GRC fields, I realized that cybersecurity is best understood in terms of liability management. This is what all the security framework certification and auditing is about, and this is a big reason security today is more about buying services from the right vendors and less about the hard tech stuff. Preventing a hack is hard. Making it so you aren't liable for the consequences is easier - and it looks like a network of companies interlinked with contracts that shift liability around. It's a kind of distributed meta-insurance (that also involves actual insurance, too).

DrillShopper 2y ago

> The defense against this is to have very clear legal principles that identify the person or people fully accountable for the machine's decisions. Be careful how hard you push for this - this is how the prosecutors in the Royal Mail fiasco drove postmasters out of business and drove a few to suicide.

JTbane 2y ago
That case was absolutely crazy, imagine getting accused of fraud and embezzlement just because of a computer bug.