Don’t jump the gun: We may not need a new law to shield us from AI harms

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In an earlier article in this column, I spoke of a lecture that Justice Easterbrook once delivered on the subject of property in cyberspace. His talk was titled ‘Cyberspace and the Law of the Horse,’ which was his way of highlighting the foolishness of coming up with fresh laws to regulate new technologies when general principles of law already addressed the concerns these new technologies raised.

He argued that there had been a number of cases where horses were bought and sold; where redress was sought for injuries caused when people were either kicked by a horse or had fallen off one of them. None of this, he said, moved us to enact a special “Law of the Horse" to deal with all these “new" harms. The general law of transfer of property, of torts, and the regulation of commercial transactions were more than enough to provide a legal framework within which these harms could be addressed.

This is advice that many of those who are writing about artificial intelligence (AI) regulation would do well to heed. Much of what is being written about AI and the harms it could cause point to the need for fresh regulation that writers feel will address the harms AI can cause. Some jurisdictions, like the EU, have already acted on these suggestions by enacting new AI legislation.