Three Liability Regimes for Artificial Intelligence: Algorithmic Actants, Hybrids, Crowds [Paperback]

This book proposes three liability regimes to combat the wide responsibility gaps caused by AI systems  vicarious liability for autonomous software agents (actants); enterprise liability for inseparable human-AI interactions (hybrids); and collective fund liability for interconnected AI systems (crowds).

Based on information technology studies, the book first develops a threefold typology that distinguishes individual, hybrid and collective machine behaviour. A subsequent social science analysis specifies the socio-digital institutions related to this threefold typology. Then it determines the social risks that emerge when algorithms operate within these institutions. Actants raise the risk of digital autonomy, hybrids the risk of double contingency in human-algorithm encounters, crowds the risk of opaque interconnections. The book demonstrates that the law needs to respond to these specific risks, by recognising personified algorithms as vicarious agents, human-machine associations as collective enterprises, and interconnected systems as risk pools  and by developing corresponding liability rules.

The book relies on a unique combination of information technology studies, sociological institution and risk analysis, and comparative law. This approach uncovers recursive relations between types of machine behaviour, emergent socio-digital institutions, their concomitant risks, legal conditions of liability rules, and ascription of legal status to the algorithms involved.

Anna Beckersis Assistant Professor of Private Law and Legal Methodology at the Faculty of Law, Maastricht University, the Netherlands.
Gunther Teubneris Professor Emeritus of Private Law and Legal Sociology at the Faculty of Law, Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

1. Digitalisation: The Responsibility Gap
I. The Problem: The DangerousHomo Ex Machina
A. Growing Liability Gaps
B. Scenarios
C. Current Law's Denial of Realls/