Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!Barry_A_Stevens From: Barry_A_Stevens@cup.portal.com Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Can you sue an expert system? Message-ID: <1788@cup.portal.com> Date: Fri, 4-Dec-87 00:05:00 EST Article-I.D.: cup.1788 Posted: Fri Dec 4 00:05:00 1987 Date-Received: Wed, 9-Dec-87 02:45:48 EST Organization: The Portal System (TM) Lines: 73 XPortal-User-Id: 1.1001.1587 I am interested in the legal aspects of using expert systems. Consider, and please comment on, this scenario. * * * * * * * * * * * A well-respected, well-established expert systems(ES) company constructs an expert financial advisory system. The firm employs the top ES applications specialists in the country. The system is constructed with help from the top domain experts in the financial services industry. It is exhaustively tested, including verification of rules, verification of reasoning, and further analyses to establish the system's overall value. All results are excellent, and the system is offered for sale. Joe Smith is looking for a financial advisory system. He reads the sales literature, which lists names of experts whose advice was used when building the system. It lists the credentials of the people in the company who were the implementors. It lists names of satisfied users, and quotes comments that praise the product. Joe wavers, weakens, and buys the product. "The product IS good,", Joe explains. "I got it up and running in less than an hour!" Joe spends the remainder of that evening entering his own personal financial data, answering questions asked by the ES, and anticipating the results. By now, you know the outcome. On the Friday morning before Black Monday, the expert system tells Joe to "sell everything he has and go into the stock market." ESs can usually explain their actions, and Joe asks for an explanation. The ES replies "because ... it's only been going UP for the past five years and there are NO PROBLEMS IN SIGHT." Joe loses big on Monday. Since he lives in California, (where there is one lawyer for every four households, or so it seems, and a motion asking that a lawsuit be declared frivolous is itself declared frivolous) he is going to sue someone. But who? The company that implemented the system? The domain experts that built their advice into the system? The knowledge engineers who turned expertise into a system? The distributor who sold an obviously defective product? Will a warranty protect the parties involved? Probably not. If real damages are involved, people will file lawsuits anyway. Can the domain experts hide behind the company? Probably not. The company will specifically want to use their names and reputations as the source of credibility for the product. The user's reaction could be, "There's the so-and-so who told me to go into the stock market." Can the knowledge engineers be sued for faulty construction of a system? Why not, when people who build anything else badly can be sued? How about the distributor -- after all, he ultimately took money from the customer and gave him the product. * * * * * * * * * * * I would be very interested in any of your thoughts on this subject. I'd be happy to summarize the responses to the net. Barry A. Stevens Applied AI Systems, Inc. PO Box 2747 Del Mar, CA 92014 619-755-7231