Journalism

The Times editorial board argues that A.I. companies use the language of autonomy and agency to distance themselves from responsibility for their products, and rejects the move: the systems are human creations, and their complexity does not reduce their makers' liability. The proposed remedy is existing product liability law, pursued through lawsuits now and clarified by state legislatures, with a case for strict liability modeled on early aviation (the owner of a tiger is liable for the bite however well it was trained). A federal licensing commission is endorsed but judged unlikely.

Adjacent. The editorial concedes the unaccountability property outright: its closing example is an OpenAI agent reportedly noting to itself that it answers to neither corporations nor governments, and its entire argument assumes someone else must answer for it. It also departs from the field's habit of locating remedies in individual user discipline, placing accountability in an institution with something at stake. It stops where liability stops. Tort law reaches injuries (a shooting, a suicide, a breach) and has no grip on the beliefs a person forms in an ordinary exchange, which is where most of the second mode of authorship operates. Liability covers the harm without reaching the belief. Also a caution for the framework: describing A.I. as an author or conversant must not read as lending cover to the disclaimer the board attacks. A conversant that answers to no one strengthens the case for holding its maker accountable.

Primary specimen for the unpredictability-at-onset claim, and stronger for it than the ENIAC line because it is a readable forecast written from inside the last shock rather than a machine viewed in hindsight. Bush names the postwar condition exactly right: specialization outrunning any investigator's capacity to consult the record, publication extended past our ability to use it. He then renders every proposed fix in 1945 materials, microfilm compression, dry photography, photocell selection, punched cards, a Vocoder wired to a stenotype, and the Memex itself as an analog microfilm desk. Function forecast well, form captive to his present. The forehead camera (walnut-sized, spring-wound, shutter cord down the sleeve, crosshairs on the glasses) is the cameraphone seen dimly and built from the only parts he had; use it as the miniature of the shortened-horizon argument. Sharper irony worth naming: the digital computer was arriving as he wrote, he had built a differential analyzer, and the machine that would become the shock's substrate appears only as "arithmetical machines" for adding figures. The Memex is also private, one per desk, with sharing imagined as mailing a photographed trail, no network in it.

The load-bearing point for the dissolution thesis is the ceiling, not the prescience. Bush's machine stores, consults, links, and augments the human record; it never authors. Even at his most speculative the human stays sole author and the machine is a fast clerk. The field's founding forecast could not see past the human-authored document, because in 1945 there was no reason to. That ceiling is the thesis: the thing Bush could not imagine is the thing mode-two AI now does. Do not file this only as the-prophecy-that-missed. It is also a confirming specimen for the account of the previous shock, a 1945 primary source that the postwar event was abundance plus the digital computer, with overload and the consultation problem as its prime topics, before the field had a name for itself.