Artificial Intelligence and Legal Disruption

Taking inspiration from artificial intelligence (‘AI’) processes and their impact on the law, this course is a continuously iterated version of previous editions of the ‘AI and Legal Disruption’ and ‘RoboLaw’ courses convened over the past several years. 
This course is heavily research-based, incorporating some of the cutting-edge work that is taking place here at the Law Faculty. 
The course is exploratory in nature and research-focused; we are less interested in how the law regulates artificial intelligence, its inputs and outputs, and the many areas of society that AI affects (though certainly these provide an important backdrop). Rather, we are primarily concerned with the disruptive of effects of AI on the law itself.

‘Artificial Intelligence’

Society stands on the cusp of unprecedented, even unfathomable, change as the maturation of decades of scientific research and technological development promises to unleash waves of brilliant technologies in the near future. Few fields hold the prospect of seismic societal disruption like artificial intelligence and robotic technologies: their impending shift from science fiction to daily reality holds the potential to inundate society with flood of fundamental challenges. It is important to emphasise that these projected disruptions to almost every sphere of human activity originate from a relatively tight cluster of emerging technologies. That this broad array of challenges emanate from a single-source origin provides unique opportunities and problems for engaging with and address AI and its attendant disruptions to society.

Converging with these conventional conceptions of artificial intelligences based upon silicon substrates and the computer sciences, are models of artificial intelligence arising from progress in neuroscience that are biologically-inspired or which integrate the biological with the artificial. Thus, an expanded conception of artificial intelligence encompasses the spectrum from produced (manufactured) to reproduced (replicated) versions, with hybrid intelligences occupying the space in between. This range creates further challenges for developing appropriate regulatory responses, but also greater opportunity for providing regulatory feedback by testing the consistency and coherence of legal and policy responses which have been framed by unspoken presumptions and implicit characteristics.

'Legal Disruption'

As human beings have long been accustomed to being the dominant form of intelligence on earth, there has been little consideration for how to accommodate other intelligent entities into human (and therefore anthropocentric) societies. This sets the stage for artificial intelligences to disrupt forms of human-centred organisation, such as law. Such disruption can be particular areas, in varied and unforeseen ways, but can also be systemic. An important subset of anthropocentric modalities of organisation are those concerned with regulation and governance, and in particular the legal systems which are relied upon in these domains. Why might the prospect of artificial intelligence disrupt the law, regulation and governance? Why might particular manifestations and applications of artificial intelligence disrupt discrete legal areas? And why might legal disruptions be more subtle and pervasive than it might appear at first glance?

It is this potential for artificial intelligences to disrupt legal principles, processes and procedures that forms the focal point of evaluation and examination in this course. Legal disruption forms the filter through which the issues embraced in this course percolate through: only artificial intelligences, or their manifestations, which are capable of fundamentally displacing legal presumptions or which systemically distort the functioning of the regulatory system will be considered. Thus, artificial intelligences and their manifestations must raise structural or systemic challenges to governance, to be included in this course. This is a necessarily high threshold, but in order to test whether an artificial intelligence or its impact passes muster, we will of course also discuss issues which might ultimately fall short of the mark.

Given the emphasis upon legal disruption, this course constantly aims at a dynamic target: as legal and policy responses to challenges posed by artificial intelligences are overcome or otherwise settled, these issues lose their disruptive effect and fall out of the ambit of this course. What loses controversy also loses interest for us. But the vantage point granted by legal disruption offers a mix of horizon-scanning for the next generation of challenges, and a measure of foresighting future issues which we will be able to prepare law and policy responses. As such, the perspective in this course celebrates the unknown and the incomplete, as a way of formulating more robust and resilient regulatory models as a response to these brilliant technologies.

Finally, the legal disruption approach allows us to deploy AI and robotic technologies as a mirror to the legal and regulatory system. It offers a rare chance to step outside of contemporary legal processes, principles and presumptions and to test their continuing efficacy, validity and tenability. As such, the promise of investigations at the intersection of AI and the law with such a conceptual framework, is that it might ‘illuminate the whole law’. From a separate vantage point, it is also possible to see any flaws or inconsistencies more clearly. It also provides a rare opportunity to improve the law, by updating its doctrine to reflect the contemporary scientific paradigm.