This piece originally appeared at Hyperdimensional.
The landscape of American innovation is indelibly shaped by where liability lies, and where it does not. Innovative technologies are very often the technologies whose tort liability exposure, for one reason or another, is limited. The COVID vaccine? Waiver. SpaceX rocket launches? Waiver. Cell phone towers? Waiver. Internet communications and social media? Waiver. Other innovative business models, such as ridesharing services, were designed in part to minimize tort liability exposure.
Most important of all, though, is software, which for the most part enjoys a miraculous existence, seemingly unbothered by the liability rules that hold back everyone else in our economy. But this has been changing before powerful AI came to the market—and AI may well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Software developers—and especially AI developers—may not be free from tort liability for much longer.
Software has been the primary driver of American innovation and growth for at least the last two decades. Tort liability could bring that dynamism to a dramatic halt. The AI community must face this problem head on. Here are some thoughts about how to do so.
