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Comment by egillie | Hacker News Reader

can we legally treat ai companies like parents of children? if a child drives a car into a storefront, the parent is responsible for the damage, and at some point you might even criminally charge the parent if there was gross negligence

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The law already works like that. You can’t write some computer code and automation, set it loose, and then go “oops the computer did it.” It’s not a defense. While it may be hard to nail down which specific engineers to lock up, the corporation as a whole absolutely can be charged criminally.

As Mitt Romney once said “corporations are people.”

Hate to say it but I don't think you're right on the legalities even in the children's case. In the US anyway, in most jurisdictions [1], if the child's act was not malicious, then parental responsibility is not automatic, but is contingent on the result being foreseeable [2] by the parents.

[1] Hawaii and Louisiana are strange in this regard. Some other states have a version of this but severely cap the amounts.

[2] "foreseeable" here standing in for a broad set of legal standards that roughly map to negligence/gross negligence/recklessness on the part of the parent

"I don't think you're right on the legalities even in the children's case" almost certainly true :) I guess I'm wondering why we aren't seeing legal action for these events yet? are these not foreseeable?

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