Who Should Pay When Machines Cause Harm? Laypeople’s Expectations of Legal Damages for Machine-Caused Harm

Abstract

The question of who should be held responsible when machines cause harm in high-risk environments is open to debate. Empirical research examining laypeople’s opinions has been largely restricted to the moral domain and has only inspected a limited set of negative outcomes. This study collects lay perceptions of legal responsibility for a wide range of machine-caused harms. We investigated how much people (N = 572) expect users and developers of machines to pay as legal damages in 37 diverse scenarios from the book “How Humans Judge Machines” by Hidalgo et al. [37]. Our results suggest that people’s expectations of legal damages for machine-caused harms are influenced by several factors, including perceived moral wrongness and the presence of victims. The scenarios exhibited substantial variation in how they were perceived and thus in the amount of legal damages they called for. People viewed both users and developers as legally responsible and expected the latter to pay higher damages. We discuss our findings in the context of future regulations of machines.