There was often some hair-splitting involved, but the law of deodands was on the books for hundreds of years in England, and it reflects still older Greek and Hebrew laws where inanimate objects that killed people were cast out or destroyed.

The railways did contribute to the end of the custom. But this is not simply because rail equipment was too expensive to seize or condemn. Richard Posner, in The Problems of Jurisprudence, notes:

> [The law of deodands] eventually became dysfunctional but, as Holmes explained, the old law turned out to have a new use. The victim of a maritime accident may encounter great difficulty in trying to obtain legal redress directly against the owner of the ship that did the harm, because the owner may live far away, quite possibly in a foreign jurisdiction. By analogy to the law of deodands, why not treat the ship itself as the wrongdoer, and hence let the victim sue the ship in the first port in which it berths after the accident? Until the suit is resolved, the ship will not be allowed to leave the port unless the ship's owner or master posts a bond. In this way the victim can obtain and collect a judgment without traveling to the owner's domicile. Admiralty law adopted this approach and still follows it.

The interesting question is: Why were trains supposedly fatal to the law of deodands whereas ships were not?

I think that it has much more to do with the decline of superstition from roughly the second half of the 18th century on -- courts began to view the old law as an irrational relic, and it gradually fell out of legal fashion.

We are so far removed from this mindset nowadays that it seems illogical. But there is an underlying logic that; the more expensive an object, the more human labor went into building it, the more the owner should pay if it causes harm. There is a notion of "with great power comes great responsibility."

Had we still had these laws, we would look at trains, airplanes and AI very differently and we would never have allowed corporations to exist.

It does seem like there is a deep wisdom in there about the dangers of complex and expensive objects. The creation of complex objects and structures (including abstract ones) is a form of idolatry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfurt_latrine_disaster

An interesting conundrum. Is the maker of the AI considered to have been practicing magic and summoning a demon? The user? What's the movable chattel object in this case?

Yer welcome.