Machine Learning: Whom To Blame, Whom To Credit In Austria?

As of April 2018, California will allow fully autonomous cars to be tested without safety drivers on public roads. One interesting question in this context is whom to blame for damages caused by artificial intelligence or machine learning systems? We took a look at this under Austrian law:

The question of liability is complex when it comes to autonomous systems or systems with artificial intelligence. A central principle of the right to compensation, namely the fault of the party causing damage, is already questionable in the case of a driver whose self-driving car has caused an accident. In this case, the issue might be whether the driver could have intervened to prevent the accident. The fault of the manufacturer (for example in the person of the software programmer) will generally be technically difficult and expensive to verify.