Why can&#39;t the current legal system handle liability for harm caused by artificial intelligence? I'm confused about why people claim that current legal system cannot handle any wrongdoings of algorithms that involve artificial intelligence. The claim is that it is impossible to find who is liable for the wrongdoing. This claim seems strange: isn't it obvious that it's the company who developed the algorithm that is liable for any issues that this algorithm caused? Can someone explain where the current legal system/framework/laws break down when it comes to any harm caused by artificial intelligence?
Real-world situations are rarely so clear-cut Let's say, hypothetically, that I'm in the driver's seat of a car. The company told me that the car has &quot;Full Self Driving&quot; capabilities based on some sort of artificial intelligence, though they also said that these capabilities &quot;are intended for use with a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment.&quot; Let's say I was not fully attentive at a moment when the car's AI decides to swerve into oncoming traffic, and I fail to grab the wheel and prevent that. Who's at fault? Is it the car company's fault for a bug that caused that? Is it my fault for failing to be fully attentive? Is it some combination of the two? But wait, it can get more complicated: maybe the car company argues that they couldn't have reasonably anticipated the situation that caused it: maybe the lines were incorrectly drawn on the road, and indicated that the road continued in that direction. Maybe I argue that the car swerved quickly enough that even a fully attentive driver couldn't have recovered. These and more are all facts that need to be sorted out in a trial. There's no way to simply say that &quot;any issues that this algorithm caused&quot; are entirely the company's fault. In other words, this isn't really the legal system &quot;breaking down&quot;—it's working as intended, trying to figure out whose fault an event actually was. The law just isn't very developed yet as to the process a court would follow to assign liability.
What statute is s 11(4) of UCTA 1977 referencing? Any and all current statutes (already in force or that may be enacted in the future but before the event occurs) that bear on the reasonableness of the attempt to limit liability. In theory, this is all current statutes. In practice, the vast majority of statutes will be self-evidently non-applicable. In this example, we are talking about contract law so statutes about crime, defence, fishing, aerospace, farming etc. are clearly not relevant. So, a practitioner needs to know which statutes will bear on contract law, and specifically on limitation of liability, and look at those. No one said studying law was easy.
In common law jurisdictions like the United States, this would probably be controlled under normal tort principles, which would mean that the answer turns on the hacking victim's state of mind. If the victim is unaware of the virus or unaware of the hacker, she probably has no duty to the hacker, and therefore cannot be held liable for any injury he suffers as a result of her failure to address the virus. But if this a case of a victim laying a trap for a potential hacker, then you have a variation on the old &quot;spring gun&quot; cases. The classic example is Katko v. Briney, 183 N.W.2d 657 (Iowa 1971). In that case, a man owned an house -- abandoned for about a decade -- that kept attracting burglars and vandals, even after he boarded it up and posted &quot;no trespassing signs.&quot; So Briney rigged up a shotgun to fire at anyone who entered the bedroom. About a month later, two antique collectors went into the house looking for old bottles and jars. One of them, Katko, opened the door to the bedroom, and the gun basically blew off one of his legs. Although he was convicted of breaking into the house, Katko sued Briney for negligence. The jury awarded Katko $20,000 for medical expenses and the like, as well as $10,000 in punitive damages. Consistent with the approach of most courts, the Iowa Supreme Court affirmed the verdict: The value of human life and limb, not only to the individual concerned but also to society, so outweighs the interest of a possessor of land in excluding from it those whom he is not willing to admit thereto that a possessor of land has ... no privilege to use force intended or likely to cause death or serious harm against another whom the possessor sees about to enter his premises or meddle with his chattel, unless the intrusion threatens death or serious bodily harm to the occupiers or users of the premises. So I'd argue that a person who leaves a virus lying around his computer, hoping to infect a hacker, is like Briney, intentionally laying a trap to injure someone who he could probably just defend himself against instead, and therefore liable to the hacker for injuries. But I could also argue it the other way: Briney's trap was designed to inflict bodily harm or even death against a person who posed no real threat, given that the property was abandoned, while a computer virus merely disables the hacker's weapon, and is used against someone who is attacking property that has greater value than an abandoned house, given the quantity and often extremely sensitive nature of contents on a personal computer. So the answer, as always, is that it could go either way.
I finally found the actual transcript of the voir dire part of the case mentioned in the question. http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=2012090614295190 As can be evidenced from the transcript, the judge has specifically instructed the two jurors working as engineers at the local tech companies that they'd have to &quot;forget&quot; what they know about both the software engineering and the patent law itself, too, starting their work on the whole case with a completely clean sheet, using a very simple criteria for making decisions: One side or the other is going to have the burden of proof on -- one side has the burden of proof on some issues, the other side has the burden of proof on other issues. When you go into the jury room to deliberate after you've tried your hardest to understand the evidence, if they haven't educated you on it or if they haven't persuaded you, the party with the burden of proof loses. It's that simple. You don't have to -- you have to make a good faith effort to understand it, but if the party with the burden of proof has failed to do that, the party with the burden of proof loses. That's the standard. You have to -- you, the jury, decide. Now, what you cannot do is bring to bear something that you've learned in some other case, some other patent case, about how some piece of equipment works or something like that. You can't do that. It has to be based on the record here. Then, after a short break and a consultation with the lawyers, where Oracle seems to have expressed some concern to having the computer experts be on the panel, which subsequently prompted the judge to declare the following to the two potential jurors who worked at Cisco and HP: So this is really going to be directed at both of you, but, you know, you come to the party, so to speak, with some prior training that bears upon the subject matter we're going to be hearing a lot about here. That's okay. That's not disqualifying, but you -- it's okay to use your common sense when you render a verdict, but you cannot add to the record in court something that you know about the way software programming works that the witnesses didn't actually testify to. You see what I'm saying? You've got to decide the record -- the case based on the record made here as opposed to adding into it what else you may have known about the way programming and software works. Since both jurors had so much software and patent experience that they couldn't disregard it easily, they were thus both excused (page 95 of 224). All right. I think it would be too hard for you to sit in this case and sort out what you knew already against what is proven or not proven here, and itwould not be fair to the parties to have that extra burden even though you two actually know something about the subject. It's in a way too bad, but it's for the best. So you two are excused to go back to the jury assembly room. Thank you. The other instructions that the judge gives to the potential jurors is also worth reading (starts on page 36 of 224) The full transcript is at http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/OraGoogle-942.pdf. In summary -- jurors are only allowed to talk to one another when the deliberation process starts, and, no, they are not allowed to bring any &quot;baggage&quot; to the case at stake.
A case for negligence or some other tort would likely never reach the stage where we could answer this question, as lawyers are generally immune from suit for their litigation conduct. I don't know of any case with facts likey you've described, but my understanding is that the litigation privilege precludes virtually any tort action based on a lawyer's statements in the course of the proceedings. Florida's Fifth District Court of Appeal, for instance, has specifically acknowledged that claims for defamation, extortion, fraud, perjury, forgery, slander of title, injurious falsehood are unavailable: The policy reasons for the privilege have often been repeated: In fulfilling their obligations to their client[s] and to the court, it is essential that lawyers, subject only to control by the trial court and the bar, should be free to act on their own best judgment in prosecuting or defending a lawsuit without fear of later having to defend a civil action for defamation for something said or written during the litigation. Ponzoli &amp; Wassenberg, P.A. v. Zuckerman, 545 So. 2d 309 (Fla. 3d DCA 1989).
The answer to the question "can so-and-so sue me?" is almost always "yes", regardless of context. Such a suit might be baseless, and it might get settled in your favor, but you still have to spend the time and money to defend yourself. This can be disastrous for a start-up that's trying to get off the ground, and it's how patent trolls make their money. (I'm not accusing SnapChat of engaging in such tactics as a rule, of course; I'm just pointing out that the legal system does allow for them.) Whether or not you are likely to be sued is a separate question, and one that can really only be effectively addressed by a trademark attorney with full knowledge of the particularities of your situation.
This is part of an indemnification clause. Basically, the idea is that the service provider guarantees that if your business gets harmed because they let in an intruder, then they will absorb the losses if somebody sues you, as long as they have control of the court case and you cooperate with them in defending the court case. So, for example, imagine you are using a web hosting service. Suppose there is a vulnerability in the hosting service computers, and a hacker is therefore able to break into your web site and steal your customer information. Your customer sues you for allowing their credit card to fall into the hands of a hacker. The web hosting service's insurance will pay the damages if the lawsuit succeeds, as long as you let their lawyers (ie the insurance company's lawyers) run the defense of the lawsuit and you cooperate with them. The reason this language is there is because the "service provider" has an insurer that is guaranteeing them if they get hacked or something, then the insurer will cover any damages. The insurer requires them to make all their clients (like you) sign an indemnification agreement which includes the control clause.
I am not a lawyer; I am not your lawyer. You do not cite a jurisdiction so this makes it very difficult to get a definitive answer. What follows is for Australia but the general principles are common law and would be applicable to other common law jurisdictions except where statues apply or case law has diverged. In the first instance, it seems that you were not party to any arrangement to pay for the electricity. So on the face of it you are not party to any contract requiring you to pay. Even if there was such an agreement: family, domestic, social and voluntary agreements (which this would be) are presumed not to be intended to legally bind the participants. Whether this presumption would be overturned would depend on the specific facts. On the face of it, there is no legal obligation to pay. Your options are: Do nothing; this puts the ball in their court, they can: Forget about it (it would then be over) Attempt to sue you with little prospect of success (which would cost them and you a lot more than $50 irrespective of who won) Do something illegal like beating you up (you really need to assess this risk) Tell everyone they know (in person and on social media) what a skiving prick you are (you could probably sue them for damages but that's not really going to happen, is it?) Pay them what they are asking Offer to pay them something less. Option 1 is likely to break any relationship you have with the person, Option 2 is likely to preserve it and Option 3 could go either way. Ultimately, like most legal questions, this is not about the law; it's about relationships ... broken ones mostly.