4 - Responsibility

Summary

This chapter examines how existing laws can and should apply to emerging technology through attribution of responsibility. Legal systems typically seek to deter identifiable persons – natural or juridical – from certain forms of conduct, or to allocate losses to those persons. Responsibility may be direct or indirect: key questions are how the acts and omissions of AI systems can and should be understood. Given the complexity of those systems, novel approaches to responsibility have been proposed, including special applications of product liability, agency, and causation. More important and less studied is the role that insurance can play in compensating harm but also structuring incentives for action. Another approach is to limit the ability to avoid responsibility, drawing on the literature on outsourcing and the prohibition on transferring certain forms of responsibility – most notably the exercise of discretion in the public sector.