Challenging Features of AI Systems

Chapter 3 identifies and analyzes four defining features of AI that complicate traditional tort law analysis: the complexity of AI architecture, its dual capacity for harm and benefit, the concentration of power among a small group of dominant actors (AI plutocracy) and AI’s inherently international reach. The chapter first explores how AI’s architectural characteristics—opacity, discreteness, diffuseness, autonomy and variability—make causation, fault attribution and accountability difficult to establish. It also examines AI’s profound duality: while capable of immense societal benefits, AI systems also create novel and large-scale risks, challenging tort law’s reactive nature and prompting a need for anticipatory, preventive frameworks. The chapter then evaluates the rise of an AI plutocracy, where technological development and de facto governance are concentrated in the hands of a few actors driven by private interests, leading to algorithmic bias, democratic deficits and weakened accountability. Finally, the chapter discusses AI’s transnational and supranational impact, emphasizing how the technology’s borderless nature undermines jurisdiction-specific liability regimes and exposes gaps in global governance and human rights protections.