What is the problem/issue being addressed?
The project addresses the regulation of computations (processes and systems), focusing on Artificial Intelligence through an innovative legal and technological framework. It aims to provide epistemic, technical and normative guidance for the development of computable laws and law-compliant computations.
Technologies based on AI can allow humans to face the grand challenges of humanity, such as maintaining a healthy environment, providing the resources for a growing population (including energy, food, and water), overcoming disease, vastly extending human longevity, and eliminating poverty.
However, the development of AI and its convergence with big data also leads to serious risks for individuals and for the whole of society. AI-based technologies may increase opportunities for control, manipulation, and discrimination; disrupt social interactions, and expose humans to harm resulting from technological failures or disregard for individual rights and social values.
Why is the issue important for society?
Unless computational entities are well-behaved —comply with legal norms, avoid harm and discrimination, respect rights and justified expectations, and transparently explain their behaviour to the individuals concerned— the infosphere may become an unfriendly and dehumanising environment, where individuals are subject to surveillance and to determinations over which they have no control, being outsmarted, cheated, and possibly harmed by faulty, illegal or unethical computations.
Moreover, the scale, speed, ubiquity and autonomy of computations make it impossible for humans to directly monitor them and anticipate all possible illegal computational behaviour.
The law can hold the hybrid infosphere under its rule – providing protection, security and trust – only if it becomes computable, i.e. it must be an internal component of computational processes rather than only an external constraint over them. Accordingly, legal norms, values and principles must be mapped onto, and partially translated into, (a) computable representations of legal information and reasoning, that (b) are processed by computational entities.
What are the overall objectives?
The current legal culture still has not adequately addressed the risks and potentials of computable law. CompuLaw project will fill this gap, providing concepts, principles, methods and techniques, and normative guidelines to support law-abiding computations.
To this end, CompuLaw will provide major methodological and substantive breakthroughs. On the one hand, it proposes a socio-technical methodology for regulatory design and evaluation. On the other hand, it develops a framework including (a) norms, legal values and principles for developers, deployers and users; (b) languages and methods to specify requirements of computations and norms directed to them; (c) cognitive architectures for legally-responsive computational agents.
CompuLaw also supports human empowerment towards and through AI technologies, by enabling individuals and civil society to monitor legal compliance of AI systems, using such systems themselves as affordances for the rule of law.
