I think it's a completely reasonable position that companies making self-driving cars and question/answer systems are legally liable for any errors.

But if you hold that position, you also have to be fine with companies not offering products and services in your country. AI systems will eventually be good enough (in 10-20 years) for companies to be able to deploy such systems with sufficient accuracy to afford the lawsuits. Until that time, such countries would just not have access to systems before they were bulletproof.

> AI systems will eventually be good enough (in 10-20 years) for companies to be able to deploy such systems with sufficient accuracy to afford the lawsuits.

I doubt that will be the case, because of the long tail problem. (same with self driving cars and other ML related problems).

In fact, we have counter-examples today. Newspapers (even reputable ones) can't get it right every time, despite the fact that they have both trained people and in theory they're setup to catch that w/ reporters - fact checkers - editors. And still, from time to time, they get it wrong. (and I'm not talking about purposefully getting it wrong, just honest mistakes.)

What will likely happen with a ruling like this is that the answers will be hedged and legalesed and muddied up the wazoo.

Who would argue for offering self-driving cars before they're ready and safe? As a cyclist and pedestrian, of course I don't want them in my country if nobody's going to be liable when they run me over. Let them work out the kinks on Americans since they're so eager to be on the cutting edge of progress.

I think they should just have to properly explain how AI tends to make things up when it doesn’t know, and that it’s good for coming up with ideas or suggesting directions for research but that you shouldn’t rely on it, because currently their advertising makes you think you can rely on it

The “AI can make mistakes” kind of disclaimers they hide in the corner don’t really cut it

> AI systems will eventually be good enough (in 10-20 years) for companies to be able to deploy such systems with sufficient accuracy to afford the lawsuits.

This doesn’t sound convincing. What AI and what company?

LLMs don’t seem like they will ever be reliable like that.

Self driving like waymo might be?

> Until that time, such countries would just not have access to systems before they were bulletproof.

Correct, most jurisdictions do not allow businesses which cannot be held liable for their actions. This is pretty core to a modern society.

Imagine if a company selling Knicks tickets was not expected to then actually provide said tickets and there was simply nothing you could do about it. Oopsies our sales page is for entertainment purposes only

To be fair, the internet has spent some 30 years figuring out how this works and it’s still not fully resolved. For the most part we’ve agreed that companies must follow the laws of both where they live and where they operate. This wasn’t always obvious!

Sounds like a win win to me

> But if you hold that position, you also have to be fine with companies not offering products and services in your country.

What sounds like a win to me. I certainly hope my country makes it dangerous for companies to break the law and/or harm the public with shitty products that aren't ready to be released legally/safely.

why offer expensive service when it's effectively useless and only add to cost and amount of work? what else they offer, "summarize my text" and "generate custom emoji"? I can live without that...

for now only volvo accepts liability, and only for "slow crawl mode"

> But if you hold that position, you also have to be fine with companies not offering products and services in your country.

Well.. I mean.. yeah? I don't think this is as bad as you think it is.

Have you looked at SV and its product offerings recently? It's mostly just enshittified gamified value extraction that doesn't respect the user at all.

"If you do not let us do all this the way we want, we will take away your ability to use our shit" hits different when the "shit" in that sentence is actually just "shit".

Plenty of products are legal in some countries and not in others.

Uh, yeah of course ?

Let someone else sacrifice the safety of their populace.

Heck - self driving is the fastest way to authoritarian government in practice. I’m surprised more people on HN haven’t cottoned on to that fact.

A self driving system will naturally build networks to share road state.

This network will eventually shift over to the government having the ability to manage how traffic should move during emergencies.

And at that point the government can easily decide where your car should go.

The inevitability of this outcome is blindingly obvious.

It’s highly beneficial to let other nations experiment and simply be followers.

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Most of the time, human beings driving cars with their own hands and eyeballs are not "liable" for their errors (unless they can be proven negligent or drunk), unless you count their insurance going up. Most car accidents do not end with anybody getting arrested, or sued, or anything like that. Insurance pays out, premiums go up, case closed.

If Waymo can be proven negligent or something, then sure, bleed em dry. But as long as they're acting in good faith and significantly reducing overall road fatalities per mile driven, I think it's actually pretty unreasonable to try to hold them to such a high standard you end up subjecting society to more of the higher fatality rates caused by humans.