Rethinking Liability Regimes For AI-Related Claims – Should Canada Follow Europe?

Overview

Daniel Dennett's masterwork From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds is a fascinating account of the evolution of human minds from bottom-up natural selection to top-down intelligent design. Dennett points out that we are in the age of intelligent design (not to be confused with its namesake creationist propaganda) in which cultural evolution has become self-comprehending and ever more refined in its search methods. This is leading us into the age of post-intelligent design – of artificial intelligence and deep learning – that produces epistemological competences without comprehension.

Artificial intelligence ("AI") systems know the what,but not the why,of what they do. The why element is still traced back to humans who create the system in the first place. But, perhaps the more important socio-legal question is how. As Dennett notes, creating something is no longer a guarantee of understanding it. We can now make things that do what we