On: The Download: rogue agent liability and the AI Hype Index

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.