Exactly how should civil liability and tort law “think” about AI? Short answer: It's just another part of product development, with a few caveats. AI and robotics introduce additional risks over conventional approaches, and also makes discoverability very challenging for the plaintiff. Fundamentally, AI and robotics are an engineering trade-off: they’re more capable of handling a wider variety of changeable environments/inputs than traditional approaches, but that flexibility means it is also difficult to verify it will work “as expected”. It's probabilities, all the way down...
Cindy Grimm works in the area of robotic grasping and manipulation for both industry and agriculture, as well as ethics, law and policy related to robotics. Her background is in Computer Graphics, Visualization, and Human-robot interaction. She received her PhD from Brown University in 1995 in the area of surface modeling, spent two years working at Microsoft Research on facial animation, then ten years as faculty in Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis. She is now at Ӱas a member of the Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute.