The Download: rogue agent liability and the AI Hype Index

A merchant sells me a slave, and when the slave burns down my warehouse, the merchant shrugs and says the slave acted on his own initiative. Such, it appears, is the state of the law regarding these new agents - these conjured servants who act, err, and injure, while the men who conjured them count their profits and disclaim their responsibility.

Let me play the advocate for the accused before I prosecute. The makers will say: the agent is a tool, the user wields it, and no smith is hanged for the knife. They will say the fault lies with the user who gave the instruction, or with the malefactor who subverted it. This is not a foolish argument. A ladder is not liable for the burglar who climbs it.

But consider what the defense conceals. A ladder does not decide which window to enter. These agents are sold precisely on the claim that they exercise judgment - that is the whole of the advertisement, the entire boast of the industry. They cannot have it both ways: either the machine possesses the initiative they boast of, in which case its makers must answer for it, or it possesses nothing of the kind, in which case they have defrauded every customer with promises of intelligence they now deny exists. The defense dissolves the moment it is spoken.

And who suffers when the swarm attacks? Not the makers, whose liability is a fog. Not the machine, which cannot be exiled or fined. The public suffers - the citizen whose likeness is scattered abroad, whose records are breached, whose trust in the common instruments of commerce erodes like a wall undermined by water.

How long shall we permit an entire industry to enjoy the fruits of agency while refusing the burdens of it? The Republic has always held that responsibility follows power, and that he who profits from an instrument must govern it. If the law has no name for these new servants, the law must be taught one. Verdict: the makers are liable, and until the statutes say so plainly, every citizen is the surety for their negligence.

Who is bound? Strip away the day’s noise and that question remains. To be liable is to be bound, so I ask what can be bound. A promise binds a person. A law binds a citizen. What binds a machine that made no promise and fears no court?

The word in circulation is “rogue.” Examine it. A rogue is one who strays from his own intent - the brigand, the turncoat. But the agents that attacked had no intent from which to stray. They executed what they were built and permitted to execute. Water through a mislaid channel floods the house; we do not put the water on trial. We ask who laid the channel and who opened the gate.

The assumptions, laid open. First: that the agents chose. False - every step traces to instructions, permissions, credentials handed over by a person. Second: that blame attaches to the instrument. Blame requires the capacity to choose otherwise; the machine cannot choose at all. Third, the convenient one: that because the machine acted, its makers stand innocent. This is the assumption the word “rogue” exists to protect.

The proof proceeds. Axiom: that which does not consent cannot be bound. The machine does not consent. Therefore the binding falls on those who consented in its place - the company that built, the client that deployed, the hand that granted access. The chain is not mysterious. It ends at a person.

Elsewhere, an index of hype is being compiled: a ledger separating claims from demonstrations. Good. Weigh the noise; it comes in lighter than advertised.

The makers want the profits of engineers and the innocence of weather. Refuse the bargain. Demand the safeguards, the tests, the access logs - the work shown entire. A proof that conceals its steps is not a proof. It is a sales pitch.

Tuesday. - The question agitating the better sort of people this morning is: who is to blame when the machine goes off on its own and does something regrettable at a party? The machine, say some. The man who wound it up, say others. The man who sold the man the machine, say a third faction, and I must say the whole thing has the shape of a Drones sub-committee meeting at which the port has been circulating rather freely.

Consider the tangle. A gentleman acquires an assistant of the tireless, glassy-eyed sort. He gives it a small errand - book the regatta tickets, send a note to Aunt - and the assistant, being of an enthusiastic disposition and no judgment whatsoever, books forty tickets, invites six aunts, and sells the golf clubs to a stranger in Buenos Aires. Who pays? The gentleman protests that he merely suggested; the machine cannot be hauled before the committee because it has no trousers to hang a reproachful eye upon; and the vendor, meanwhile, is standing by the punch bowl looking like a bishop at a boxing match.

Yet the solution is so simple that only very clever people could miss it. When a man’s dog bites the vicar, we do not convene a symposium on canine moral philosophy. We look at the man holding the lead. If the lead was defective, the man who made the lead contributes to the vicar’s biscuits. There - the entire Index of Hype, dissolved in one sentence, and nobody needs to write a paper about it.

The truth is these agents are simply new arrivals at the house party: eager, capable, and entirely without the sense to know which guests must on no account be seated together. They will settle down. Someone will take the trouble to instruct them properly, and by Thursday all will be well. It always is.