Cars are net positive, and also cause lots of harm. Car companies are sometimes held liable for the harm caused by cars, e.g. if they fail to conform to legal safety standards or if they sell cars with defects. More frequently the liability falls on e.g. a negligent driver or is just ascribed to accident. The solution is not just “car companies should pay out for every harm that involves a car”, partly because the car companies also don’t capture all or even most of the benefits of cars, but mostly because that’s an absurd overreach which ignores people’s agency in using the products they purchase. Making cars (or ladders or knives or printing presses or...) “robust to misuse”, as you put it, is not the manufacturer’s job.
Liability for current AI systems could be a good idea, but it’d be much less sweeping than what you’re talking about here, and would depend a lot on setting safety standards which properly distinguish cases analogous to “Alice died when the car battery caught fire because of poor quality controls” from cases analogous to “Bob died when he got drunk and slammed into a tree at 70mph”.
Cars are net positive, and also cause lots of harm. Car companies are sometimes held liable for the harm caused by cars, e.g. if they fail to conform to legal safety standards or if they sell cars with defects. More frequently the liability falls on e.g. a negligent driver or is just ascribed to accident. The solution is not just “car companies should pay out for every harm that involves a car”, partly because the car companies also don’t capture all or even most of the benefits of cars, but mostly because that’s an absurd overreach which ignores people’s agency in using the products they purchase. Making cars (or ladders or knives or printing presses or...) “robust to misuse”, as you put it, is not the manufacturer’s job.
Liability for current AI systems could be a good idea, but it’d be much less sweeping than what you’re talking about here, and would depend a lot on setting safety standards which properly distinguish cases analogous to “Alice died when the car battery caught fire because of poor quality controls” from cases analogous to “Bob died when he got drunk and slammed into a tree at 70mph”.