Hermer demands urgent law to control artificial intelligence

The Refrigerator’s Long Memory

The story repeats a comparison from Richard Hermer: that artificial intelligence is less regulated than a refrigerator. It sounds like a complaint about the launch, about what checks a system should pass before it reaches the public. But a made thing does not stop where its maker’s attention stops; it goes on acting in a world no laboratory contains. The question the comparison raises, perhaps more than its author intended, is the only one that lasts: who is answerable for what these systems do after release, and what have their makers declined to imagine?

Take the refrigerator seriously, because it deserves better than to be a punchline. Most of the law that governs it has nothing to do with the moment of manufacture. It governs the decades afterward: the recall when a compressor fails, the duty to label what it consumes, the rules for what happens when it is carried to the kerb and its coolant must be drawn off by someone with a licence and a form. The fridge is regulated less as an invention than as a long tenancy in the world. Its maker is presumed to owe something for as long as the object hums in somebody’s kitchen.

That presumption was not always there, and how it arrived matters here. The cooling gases of the last century were celebrated as a triumph of safe chemistry: inert, non-toxic, admirably dull. Their harm was invisible at the point of sale and for many years after. It accumulated far overhead, in a place no manufacturer had thought to model, until the thinning of the upper atmosphere made the debt impossible to ignore. What answered it was the robust international law Mr Hermer now asks for. The Montreal Protocol bound nations to phase out a product already in millions of homes. It is the clearest precedent we have for law that reaches past the launch and reclaims an obligation the makers believed they had discharged.

The strongest objection to his argument deserves a fair statement. A refrigerator does one thing. Its failures can be listed, its harms measured, its substitutes manufactured. A general-purpose system that writes, reasons, and acts is not an appliance but a medium, and a medium cannot be inspected the way a compressor can. The objector would say that writing appliance law for such a thing gives the comfort of a safety sticker and none of the substance. On this view, the refrigerator comparison flatters regulators by suggesting that the problem is familiar.

I think the objection is right about the object and wrong about the duty. The lesson of the cooling gases was never that their harms could be foreseen. The lesson was that they went unforeseen because nobody’s obligation extended to the sky, and the law’s achievement was to make it extend there afterward. What Mr Hermer’s argument needs is a regime built for the same discovery: harms surfacing years after deployment, in places no evaluation looked. Such a regime would keep the maker answerable while the system is in use, through ongoing disclosure, through a duty to withdraw or amend, and through liability that does not vanish when a model is passed on to a deployer, then to a user, then to a chain of automated actions in which every link is said to be acting on its own.

That chain is where the real gap in accountability lies. When an appliance catches fire, the investigator can trace it to a factory. When a deployed system misleads a patient or denies a claim, responsibility is spread so thin that each party can show the harm arose somewhere downstream of its own conduct. I do not read the warning that we might lose control of the future as a prophecy of machines in revolt. I read it as a forecast of this dispersal: a future in which serious harm arrives addressed to no one, and every institution has a sound legal reason to return it unopened.

There is a danger in the remedy as well. A treaty can be treated as its own kind of launch, signed and applauded and then left behind while the technology moves on. The ozone agreement worked because it kept convening, tightening, and amending as the measurements came in. Any law for artificial intelligence that is fixed at signing will be a fridge regulated by its brochure.

Picture the technician who stands in an empty flat beside an old appliance, gauge in hand, recording in a ledger exactly what is being drawn out of it. No one there remembers who built the thing. The law remembers anyway.