{"id":94452,"topic":"ai","source":"The Guardian","title":"We don’t need to panic about AI. We need to hold its creators accountable when things go wrong | John Quiggin - The Guardian","url":"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/oct/02/we-dont-need-to-panic-about-ai-we-need-to-hold-its-creators-accountable","url_hash":"92f6d1431962fff0408ed0214f40903335a32009","author":"","summary":"We don’t need to panic about AI. We need to hold its creators accountable when things go wrong | John Quiggin The Guardian","content":"The recent panic about a breach of Medicare computer security by an “AI agent” contrasts sharply with other recent cases such as the Telstra and Optus outages that left many Australians unable to reach Triple Zero. In those cases, no one blamed the computers involved. The mistakes were clearly sheeted home to the corporations that operated them.\nThis wasn’t always the case. 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Either the human who entered the prompt or the corporation producing the code made a mistake, and they should be held liable for the resulting damages. If it’s impossible to work out who is at fault, liability should be joint and several – that is, both are liable for the full amount of the same loss, and the cost can be allocated between them.\nFixing the problems of agentic software won’t be easy. The frequency with which early computer programs malfunctioned made “debugging” (a term predating its use in computing) an essential part of information technology. Bugs might be found in the operating system, the program itself or the information fed into it. In one case, the problem was a literal bug: a moth that got caught in the relays. But with enough determination the source of the problem could usually be found and fixed.\nTraditional debugging is much more difficult with agentic programs. It may be possible, after the fact, to work out what the program has done. 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They are far more comfortable talking about “hallucinations” and “rogue agents” than about their own responsibility for programs that produce massive errors and real-world damage.\nBut once AI corporations are made to bear the financial consequences of their reckless negligence, a different kind of calculus will come into play. Instead of thinking, “what cool thing can we make this program do”, the first question will be, “what could go wrong if we let it run”.\nForcing corporations to bear liability for damage caused by their actions will, in all probability, drastically slow the “hyperscaling” rush to produce more and increasingly powerful agentic software. That’s a good thing for the environment as well as the economy.\nAnd none of this will preclude the many benign uses of “AI” software, including massively improved internet search, document summarisation and translation, and software coding. These uses come with the adjustment problems that always arise with new technology, eliminating some jobs while creating others, and so on. 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