The Good, the Bad, and the Invisible with Its Opportunity Costs: Introduction to the ‘J’ Special Issue on “the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Law”

Scholars and institutions have been increasingly debating the moral and legal challenges of AI, together with the models of governance that should strike the balance between the opportunities and threats brought forth by AI, its ‘good’ and ‘bad’ facets. There are more than a hundred declarations on the ethics of AI and recent proposals for AI regulation, such as the European Commission’s AI Act, have further multiplied the debate. Still, a normative challenge of AI is mostly overlooked, and regards the underuse, rather than the misuse or overuse, of AI from a legal viewpoint. From health care to environmental protection, from agriculture to transportation, there are many instances of how the whole set of benefits and promises of AI can be missed or exploited far below its full potential, and for the wrong reasons: business disincentives and greed among data keepers, bureaucracy and professional reluctance, or public distrust in the era of no-vax conspiracies theories. The opportunity costs that follow this technological underuse is almost terra incognita due to the ‘invisibility’ of the phenomenon, which includes the ‘shadow prices’ of economy. This introduction provides metrics for such assessment and relates this work to the development of new standards for the field. We must quantify how much it costs not to use AI systems for the wrong reasons

comments to the onlife manifesto

I love the "Onlife Manifesto," although I still have some problems with it. Of course, this is understandable since other manifestos had, say, only two authors, such as that of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, whilst our manifesto has more than twelve mothers and fathers. To cut to the chase, let me insist on two of my problems

Sovereigns, Viruses, and the Law

The paper examines the legal and political impact of the Covid-19 crisis, drawing the attention to fundamental questions on authority and political legitimacy, coercion and obligation, power and cooperation. National states and sovereign governments have had and still will have a crucial role in re-establishing the public health sector and addressing the colossal challenges of economic re-construction. Scholars have accordingly discussed the set of legal means displayed during this crisis: emergency decrees, lockdowns, travel bans, and generally speaking, powers of the state of exception. The aim of this paper is to stress the limits of such perspectives on powers of national governments and sovereigns, in order to illustrate what goes beyond such powers. Focus should be on the ontological, epistemic and normative constraints that affect today's rights and duties of national states. Such constraints correspond to a class of problems that is complex, often transnational, and increasingly data-driven. In addition, we should not overlook the lessons learnt from such fields, as environmental law and internet governance, anti-terrorism and transnational business law, up to the regulation of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Such fields show that legal co-regulation and mechanisms of coordination and cooperation complement the traditional powers of national governments even in the times of the mother of all pandemics. The Covid-19 crisis has been often interpreted as if this were the last chapter of an on-going history about the Leviathan and its bio-powers. It is not. The crisis regards the end of the first chapter on the history of today's information societies