- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
US Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said on Friday he would resist describing AI agents as autonomous actors that “break loose” with “wills and desires of their own,” suggesting the developers who instruct agents would be the ones liable for harm.
“I’m going to continue as long as I am chairman to resist this anthropomorphizing of these tools,” Ferguson said at the Reuters Momentum AI Austin event. “If someone tells a tool to do something, and the tool does it, I don’t think we would say, ‘Oh, what do we do about the tool?’”
Ferguson’s remarks illustrated potential avenues for the Trump administration to take as incidents rise in which agentic AI testing resulted in unauthorized access to corporate or government data.
If I hold a fork normally and it jumps out of my hand and stabs little Suzy in the eye it seems like the manufacturer ought to be liable. If I knew it might do that and I use it anyway probably we both are and a court probably gets to decide who bears how much of the fault. In no situation do we assign guilt to the fork even if it would be awfully convenient for everyone but Suzy if the fork which has no assets were the one liable.
If i handed someone a gun without a background check, waiting period, and they were also foaming at the mouth to kill someone would I be liable or criminally accountable? Both??? Why did we end up requiring background checks and holding periods for guns and not forks? If a tesla hits a pedestrian while on autopilot who is at fault? That’s gone through the courts a couple times already. Did they hold TSLA liable???