The Ratio Method: A Heuristic Approach to Addressing Complex Tort Liability Frameworks in the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Harrison Margolin, Grant Frazier · SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020
Technological innovation is a fundamental driver of economic productivity and human progress. While foundational U.S. economic and legal principles effectively catalyze American innovation, they do not adequately account for technological progress outpacing regulators’ ability to control for associated negative externalities. Emerging technologies in the Fourth Industrial Revolution show fundamental promise for improving the means of production and quality of life, but may also cause significant social disruption—including via sophisticated cyberattacks; automation-driven labor-displacement; and the corruption of human and pathogenic gene elements. In many instances, only specialists understand the underlying technical processes. This results in a knowledge gap for legislators—who are tasked with drafting effective policy frameworks, and judges—who are tasked with interpreting and applying these frameworks to ever-more complicated technologies, the details of which are important to arriving at the correct legal outcome. This is not the first time the U.S. legal system has been challenged to adapt its tort doctrines to respond to the societal risks of innovation. A central assumption of these adaptations has been that civil liability controls for the disruptive effect of technology by reapportioning costs to those best suited to avoid them, while correcting for instances in which good faith care-taking efforts nonetheless fall short. Our Article proposes a heuristic method for assessing coherent liability frameworks to optimize liability policymaking for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This method utilizes variables of economic and legal significance from precedential regulation, and is applied herein to contemporary legal issues associated with Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing to demonstrate the method’s efficacy.