[onlyrealcuzzo]

> The problem is that people are now building our world around tooling that eschews accountability.

Management has doing a wonderful job of eschewing accountability for decades.

It's a lot of people's dream to be able to say, yeah, our product doesn't work, but it's not OUR fault, and the client just shrug and grumble ai ai ai, and just put up with it because they know they can't get a better service anywhere else.

It's not MY fault my website is down: it's Amazon's! It's not MY fault my app doesn't work: it's Claude Code's!

[bilbo0s]

Well just to be clear from a legal perspective, in the case of AI, as long as AI is "property", the owners, developers, and/or users will be held liable for things like the hypothetical fatal car accident that Sussman posits.

Currently, from a legal perspective, AI is considered a "tool" without legal persona. So you sue the developer, the owner, or the user of the AI. (Just kidding, any lawyer worth his/her salt will sue all three! But you get the point.)

Legally speaking, AI will probably be viewed that way for a long time. There are too many issues agitating against viewing it any other way. Owners will not give up property rights. No will to overbear. On and on and on.

[account42]

This doesn't seem to be how it works in practice. "AI" or not, complex systems are a pretty good shield from accountability in practice today.

[bilbo0s]

PSA. Do not listen to advice like this.

>complex systems are a pretty good shield from accountability in practice today.

Maybe complex legal systems are, but complex software systems offer you no such protection.

My field for the past few decades has been diagnostic medical software. In that field, the 501K you got is kind of entering you into an ironclad agreement with the government. There's almost no way out of it. 501K certs significantly simplify, (for the government), holding you accountable. You have made attestations to suitability directly to the federal government. And the way our chief counsel explained it to us, literally each signature you sent to the government, for each feature that failed, is actually a single count of lying to the federal government.

Please, please, please people, don't listen to comments like the one above. Everything should be run by your qualified legal expert. Getting things right up front is so much easier than trying to fix things when the inevitable happens.

Alternatively, stick to fields free from regulation. That's also a viable strategy. But to just trust that the legal system is complicated and the technology you're deploying is complicated, so the feds will never get me? That's the start of a lot of really bad stories.