Construction Industry to Face Unique Questions with Automated Equipment Use

The question of who’s at fault if things go wrong with an autonomous piece of equipment is going to be important, as someone has to write the machine’s programming, someone else has to set it up and even more people have to make sure it’s running properly, for instance.

“You use the contracts up front to assign risk to the party best suited to deal with it and with the new technologies there’s a real question as to which party that might be,” said Clark Thiel, the leader of Pillsbury’s Construction Counseling & Dispute Resolution practice. “Someone needs to take ownership.”