A self-driving vehicle ploughs into an oncoming car, combusting the occupants and leaving those who survive battered and bruised and staring into their devices wondering who is to blame.
That’s the jump off point to Bruce Holsinger’s tech-lit bestseller Culpability, an exploration of agency and responsibility in the era of AI through the eyes of a lawyer, an ethicist and their screen-dependent offspring.
It’s also a broader description of our current moment as this self-propelling technology accelerates exponentially before it has been fitted with brakes, seatbelts, speed limits or a working GPS.
Working back from the crash, Holsinger skilfully weaves together the concurrent lines of causation: those who design the tech, those who deploy it, those who use it and, most profoundly, the spaces that overlap.
“Culpability” lies in these grey areas of legal and moral accountability where we are still thinking through formal and ethical rules of engagement, which themselves are strapped to the bonnet of this out-of-control vehicle.
Right now, there is justified focus on the responsibilities of those building the Large Language Models and taking them to market, even as they struggle to explain how they work or how they can be deployed safely.
When not dropping bombs on Iranian schoolgirls, the White House has been at war with its own broligarchcy, demanding the right to use AI models to surveil their citizens and fire autonomous weapons. Spoiler: Anthropic pushed back; OpenAI bent over.
Closer to home, our policymakers are struggling to come up with a coherent response to how these models should be deployed. The federal government has eschewed a stand-alone AI Act, putting its faith in the messy process of updating a slew of existing laws.
One bright spot in this sea of inertia is the New South Wales parliament, which has just passed laws requiring work rosters and allocations to be transparent so that employers do not allow AI to abrogate their legal responsibility to provide a safe place of work.
But there is another actor in this story, for whom the technology might be a valuable tool or a material threat (or, more likely, both): us. With recent Essential polling suggesting more than 40% of Australian adults are already using generative AI, how we choose to use this technology is a critical piece of this puzzle.
It is here that the regulation of the motor vehicle, one of the transformational technologies of the 20th century, might offer a guide on how culpability could be distributed.
When cars were first invented in the late 19th century, it soon became apparent they were killing machines, with thousands of deaths registered in the first decade alone. By the end of the 20th century, the car had accounted for an estimated 60 million worldwide fatalities including 200,000 in Australia.
The early regulatory responses to this danger now seems laughable: a man walking ahead of the vehicle waving a red flag was one intervention as wealthy motorists…
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