Assessing Responsibility for Program Output

Remember the days when record-keeping trouble, such as an enormous and clearly erroneous bill for property taxes, was attributed to "computer error?" It can be seen easily in exaggerations like this, from a tech news digest: "Google's Artificial Intelligence (AI) has learned how to navigate like a human being." See the Nature article by the Google researchers2 for the accurate, cautious, description and assessment. The quote given cites an article in Fast Company, which states that "AI has spontaneously learned how to navigate to different places."4 But this is not the root of the problem.