Established legal principles already hold most of the answers to AI liability, argues Ian McDougall
In 1865, Parliament, alarmed by steam traction engines on the public roads, passed the Locomotives Act. It required a person to walk 60 yards ahead of any self-propelled vehicle carrying a red flag, and limited speed to four miles an hour in the country and two in town. The Red Flag Act survived until 1896. We laugh now, but that foolishness rested on an assumption we still make, namely that something new must need new law.
I find that assumption increasingly wearying. When the internet arrived, we were assured that cyberspace lay beyond the reach of settled law, and then Godfrey v Demon Internet Ltd, in 1999, resolved a dispute over an online posting with the ordinary law of defamation. Judge Frank Easterbrook had already warned, in 1996, that there was no more need for a ‘law of cyberspace’ than for a ‘law of the horse’. Horses produced sales, injuries and bailments, all handled perfectly well by contract, tort and
