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Comment by landryraccoon | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the concept of blame is meaningless when it comes to robots, and we’re clinging to a cultural and spiritual concept of blame that serves no purpose when it comes to robots.

If a robot doesn’t function properly, you fix it or take it out of service. Taking retribution against a robot (or abstractly, the civilization that created it) is of questionable value. The right question is how do we build robots that don’t lose fortunes?

The fact that human beings get angry at robots and want retribution or recompense for malfunctions is an evolutionary adaptation for dealing with other humans. It is useless when it comes to dealing with non sentient deterministic agents. Sure, if the robot was being controlled by a human, go after the human. If not, what’s the point?

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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 responsible party". Otherwise, the introduction of a "robot" in the workflow becomes a wildcard to evade torts of all sorts.

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.

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.

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.

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

Which is a problem we should not just accept, but do something about.

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