Strict Liability for AI and other Emerging Technologies

Amidst all the buzz about artificial intelligence (AI), liability has always played a conspicuous role. Hollywood’s science fiction industry seems to have stimulated perceptions that autonomous robots would be things with no owner but instead with their own personality that might dictate them one day to start killing people. And even people less inspired by science fiction seem to be fixated on the idea that, for instance, autonomous cars would be behaving in an entirely unpredictable way and that they, and the accidents they cause, are so different from conventional cars and accidents that we are facing a ‘legal vacuum’. It is thus the impression of humans handing over control to machines that has fuelled a fear of emerging liability gaps, leaving victims largely uncompensated for harm and allowing tortfeasors to hide behind software code nobody feels responsible for. This fear of liability gaps is one of the reasons that led the European Parliament to pass, on 20 October 2020, a resolution that includes a full-fledged ‘Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council on liability for the operation of Artificial Intelligence-systems’. This Proposal puts further pressure on the Commission, which, on the basis of the report submitted by the Expert Group on Liability and New Technologies – New Technologies Formation (EG-NTF), had