A driverless Waymo taxi drove through the South Pearl Street Farmers Market in Denver on Sunday morning, prompting questions about how accountability applies to non-human agents. Fortunately, no one was injured in what turned out to be almost a comical incident. But technological innovations have brought America to the cusp of artificial entities that could prove far more threatening. How governments choose to respond to these new vistas will both depend on and inform our understanding of what it means to be human.

Every Sunday morning, street barriers close South Pearl Street to vehicular traffic for the duration of the farmer’s market, which features some 160 vendors. At 8:15 a.m. local time, one entrance was already closed, but barricades at the other end of the street stood to one side until the vendors finished setting up their wares. A driverless Waymo taxi was navigating to a nearby address and failed to detect the context clues that would have notified a human that the street was closed.

“Our barricades are moved to the side during setup because the traffic is coming in with vendors,” the market’s production director Nicole Jarman described. “And it just joined like it was a vendor. It just came on the street, followed actually vendor traffic flow perfectly.” Looking vaguely like a lost Star Wars robot, the car ambled between pop-up tents in a lane clearly not designed for large vehicles.

“There is no driver or anyone in the car,” said Theodore Subbotin, who works the farmer’s market for a Denver bakery. “We have to usher it out, which is hard to do.”

Fortunately, market staff successfully shepherded the driverless car out of the market without incident, but that is only where the questions begin.

“No one was hurt,” summarized one local news station, “but the incident does bring up safety concerns surrounding Waymo.” This works as a transitional line in a news story, but it doesn’t quite hit the core issue. Apart from its initial mistake to enter the closed road, the car did navigate itself safely.

However, the car did not navigate itself responsibly, for the very good reason that it cannot be held responsible for its actions. And therein lies the gist of the issue.

“There’s no law to ticket the Waymo that drove through a Denver farmers market,” warned an article title from another local station. Technically speaking, there shouldn’t be. The Waymo vehicle cannot be ticketed because a ticket’s fine would be meaningless. As a non-person, it owns no property, which means it has no money. Unless the city is prepared to tow or lock up driverless vehicles who accrue a certain number of infractions, a ticket would have no consequence for a car. (Fines would be more properly assessed against the company which owns the car, but more on that later.)

That article title was trying to express the perplexity felt by local law enforcement agencies at their inability to impose consequences. If a similar incident occurred, the police would be just as powerless to respond. “If there’s no driver, there currently isn’t a mechanism within state law for issuing a citation,” a Denver Police Department said, and Colorado State Patrol confirmed it. In 2017, the Colorado legislature enacted a bill allowing autonomous vehicles to operate so long as they are capable of following applicable traffic laws, but offering no mechanism for consequences.

The article mentions California’s law by way of positive contrast, “Under a law that took effect this year, the state can issue formal noncompliance notices directly to the company operating a self-driving car — not the vehicle itself — when it breaks traffic laws.” In this instance, California’s law is superior. That’s a rarity, so it’s worth exploring its warrant.

That warrant goes to the very root of what it means to be human. The consistent testimony of Scripture is that humans are responsible moral agents, who can and will be held accountable for their actions. “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Corinthians 5:10). No other entity in the physical creation is morally responsible like humans — although spiritual beings like demons and Satan arguably are (e.g., Revelation 20:10).

Mosaic case law applies this principle in various ways. If an axe head flies off the handle mid-stroke and kills a bystander, it is simply assumed that no one would think of holding the axe head responsible; Moses provides due process to ensure the axe-wielder a fair trial (Deuteronomy 19:5). If Israel’s army was besieging a Canaanite city, they were not to cut down its trees, for, “Are the trees in the field human, that they should be besieged by you?” (Deuteronomy 20:19).

The case of animals is slightly different. An ox who gored a person to death was stoned (Exodus 21:28) according to the Noahic covenant (Genesis 9:5). But that principle has more to do with protecting human life than treating the animal as a morally responsible agent. The law prohibited putting a son to death for his father’s sin or vice versa (Deuteronomy 24:16), but it did require an owner to be put to death if his ox gored because of his negligence (Genesis 21:29). Thus, owners of property can be held responsible for the actions of animals who are their property, for these are not independent moral agents (just one Mosaic principle working to undermine slavery).

Humans are unique in the world because they are made in God’s image (Genesis 1:26-27). That special status gives them a special responsibility over the world (Genesis 1:28) and a special accountability for their actions (Genesis 3:16-19).

From dishwashing to computing, humans can outsource many tasks to artificial machines, perhaps even artificial intelligence. But they cannot outsource their moral responsibility to an entity without a soul. If a driverless car breaks traffic laws, the persons who made that car must be held responsible. (For this and other applications, a corporation is simply a collection of individual persons.) If an autonomous drone or bipedal robotic suit uses lethal force against a person outside of war, its makers must be held responsible. If an AI agent, say, hacks a government website or commits some other cybercrime, its developers should be held responsible.

Some may protest that this principle conveys a heavy burden of responsibility on those developing new technology, who may not intend to commit the crimes of which their products may be guilty. It is, admittedly, a sobering burden. But someone will bear responsibility, and human creators cannot pass the buck on to their machines. This sobering reality should motivate creators of new technology to take special care that their products do not exceed proper moral boundaries.

An un-citable robot car in Denver illustrates just how underprepared Americans are to meet this new moral reality.