Is it though? It shows up in the legal system in lots of places already.
If you are shown to be professionally negligent, depending on the specifics you can be charged or sued (or both) even if nobody yet was harmed; you've only created a risk.
That's like prosecuting Tesla right now for their Autopilot before anyone has been killed because of their faulty software.
Otherwise all activities could be found to be harming after the fact. Note that this doesn't apply to civil suits.
Right, but that's not the case here - that's not what the court is doing. If they were levying a fine for past damage based on todays knowledge, it would be ex-post-facto.
Agree the tesla example isn't great, if that's all you were responding to.
There are lots of areas of law where this concept, or similar ones, crop up - that's all I'm saying. Pretending it "doesn't make sense" is illogical, because we've made (legal) sense of it.