Lost in Cyberspace : Legal causation in the age of AI and driverless cars

Gilbertson Davis LLPConstruction Litigation, Information Technology, Insurance, Technology and Internet, Trucking and Transportation0 Comments

One day, in the immediate future, you might very well witness this scene from your office window.   A lawyer jaywalks across a Toronto street to avoid being late for a firm risk management committee meeting.  While she does so, she texts her colleague in Calgary with instructions on containing the legal liabilities arising from a northern Alberta oil plant shut-down that has already occurred in the future (a reality of simultaneity across locally-logged events across a multi-timezone world) after an eco-terrorist hacked into the plant heating system. It is at this moment that she is struck by an autonomous delivery van. The van was travelling the wrong way down a one-way street because the city transportation department had not uploaded a temporary change to traffic direction to accommodate a condo developer.  An algorithm built into the telephone service to warn the lawyer of oncoming traffic fails to alert her because the … Read More