﻿  The first issue that I am challenging is centered on the idea of an AI system representing
a corporation or person. According to the Stanford Study, there are “regulatory bodies
in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere [which have set] conditions under which
software can enter into a binding contract.” The problem that I see with this is that a computer
does not “understand” in the same capacity that humans can “understand” in. You can
try and simulate human thought process and problem solving all you want, but in its current state
artificial intelligence simply can’t do it. A computer only reacts to its environment in the
ways it’s told, and while it may possess the ability to learn from past processes, it still
does not actually understand the underlying aspects of it.
  So then if an AI system can’t understand the binding document it is signing, then
I don’t think it should be signing them at all. The software technically makes its
“own decisions”, but these decisions were originally encoded by a developer. I think that
if the need were to arrive for a piece of software to enter into a binding contract, then
the original developer should have to sign it. Basically, until we can emulate the human
thought process almost perfectly, the role of representing corporation should be left to us.
  I also want to talk on the topic of self-driving cars. One line that stuck out to
me was this: “Self-driving cars will eliminate one of the biggest causes of accidental
death and injury in United States, and lengthen people’s life expectancy.” I think that
this statement is very generous in its analysis and is way too optimistic. In a perfect
world, yes self-driving cars would fix all of our problems on the road. They would
make travel completely safe and eliminate human error. But unfortunately it does not
work that way and computers and other systems have problems. I think that everyone that has ever
worked with any sort of electronics/computers knows that they can fail unexpectedly. And
I think that one of the worst places for a computer to fail is going 70 mph down an
interstate. I’m not saying that self-driving cars have no place in the world right now, but
we need to be careful about how we approach it. I think that for the above statement to
really be true, at least 95% of the cars on the road need to be self-driving and able to
interact with each other
  It’s also important to look at the legal aspect of self-driving cars. If a driverless car
were to get into an accident with a human driven car and it was the driverless car’s fault,
who would get the blame? Would it be the company’s fault? Or say there was a passenger in the car,
would they be to blame for not trying to avoid the accident? It’s situations like this which
make the implementation of artificial intelligence harder than it seems on the surface.
