What excites you most about joining The Dickson Poon School of Law?
The Dickson Poon School of Law has been home to some of the most generative scholarship at the intersection of law, jurisprudence, and technology. Such a research and policy focused agenda is extremely timely and relevant today as we witness an ever increasing overlapping-or conflict- between fundamental pillars of the western legal system and the affordances of new technologies.
Legal approaches such as technology neutrality are confronting the material reality of having to deal with highly programmable and (re)configurable devices. We are starting to realise that we cannot be neutral on a moving platform. At such a time of legal and technological transformations, The Dickson Poon School of Law, with its strong intellectual heritage and a rapidly growing law and tech community, is already chartering new intellectual and methodological terrains for law and policy.
This in itself, is really, really exciting. And I have not even got into the feeling of being part of the larger School, whose members (faculty and support staff) have been so welcoming, helpful, and kind since the very early days of my appointment.
Could you tell us more about your research in AI and Law?
For almost two decades now, western legal scholars have been trying to ‘catch up’ with technological progress mainly by leveraging concepts and thinking patterns they are familiar with. This, of course, is understandable but it has led to false analogies and serious regulatory misfires the most crucial of them being our disregard of the monumental transformations in the field of computing and sensing. Today we slowly wake up to the realisation that what we had perceived and analysed as neutral artefacts that produce regulable services are in fact parts of a larger infrastructure of information and computation whose goal and function is to keep (re)configuring and ‘gatekeep’ what is possible for our modern markets and societies.
Cloud infrastructures are fundamental to this transformation and neither law nor regulation have meaningfully grappled with their impact. In this direction, my research aims at shaping the theoretical and methodological preconditions for a legal and policy agenda capable of encompassing the central role of cloud infrastructures and that of computing in the global political economy.
What is the main problem you are solving and how do you see it fitting into the growing and evolving AI landscape?
People and institutions are dependent on cloud infrastructures. This dependency does not only entail ‘control’ over information flows neither can it be substantially balanced by asserting some sort of ‘sovereignty’ over imaginary digital lands. Being on the cloud, in other words, does not only mean having data and information available remotely and on-demand and, consequently, solving the problem of cloud dependency cannot be resolved merely by redistributing admin rights. Instead, more creative legal thinking is needed. For this to develop, we need to confront and understand how cloud infrastructures transform our organisational patterns, institutional affordances, innovation dynamics, and routines of social action. By arguing for the public value of programmability, we can safeguard that systems of advanced computational capabilities (read ‘AI’) and related device functionalities, will be developed and rolled out to benefit those who need them rather than those who want to sell them.
How much should we trust AI to make big decisions in areas like law?
Imagine asking: ‘Should we trust a calculator?'On its own, such a question hardly makes sense. We would certainly trust that a calculator will always return the correct number to a numerical query. But would we trust a calculator to calculate and issue a decision over a life-changing occasion? Probably not. Would our approach be any different if it were for a very, very advanced calculator? Again, probably not because there seems to be something inherently human and valuable in expecting that another human-being will judge our rights and obligations when the stakes are high. We trust our friends, our students, our families, our colleagues, our teammates, and a few others. At times, we also trust that public institutions will deliver on their promise that regardless of who is in charge of the government, the rule of law will prevail. This trust is a result of complicated social actions and political choices we make along the way of our individual and collective lives. We cannot trust a calculator on the same terms. And an advanced calculator (read again ‘AI’), is no different.
What do you think are some of the biggest legal challenges or potential legal challenges posed by AI?
The idea that everyone’s creative work is potentially exploitable input to an insatiable machine of ever-chasing growth, is deeply worrying. In the past, when the balance of interests was reversed (e.g. during the early 00s legal battles over peer-to-peer technologies) and when the IP rights of the few were made available to the many, law responded very quickly and decidedly by making sure that creativity and ownership of creative works will be respected. Now that the IP rights of the many are made available to the few with the computational capacity necessary to crawl everything, everywhere, all at once, law is extremely slow to provide a resolution. So, the way I see it, the biggest challenge is that people will lose/are losing faith in law’s ability to provide a just and equitable resolution to technological changes that threatens to violate their lifetime projects as well as the culture of learning and creating that future generations will be able to enjoy.
How should our legal system change to deal with AI making decisions?
Legal reasoning is by its nature vulnerable to exploitation and replication by tools of advanced computation. The more standardised legal interpretation is and the more boilerplate its structure, the easier it becomes for machines to identify their patterns and replicate them. So, as long as these tools are allowed to operate on the same terms as they do now, lawyers, judges, teachers, and students will use them to (re)produce ‘mainstream’ legal analysis at scale. Legal professionals won’t work less, they will just have incalculably larger volume of materials, cases, and documents to work with. This demise of legal practice to a profession of plausible automaticity is not inevitable. If legal reasoning is a practice that can be replicated by pattern-finding machines then perhaps it’s time we accepted-at least in theory-that there might have been something inherently limited in the way we have been developing methods and tools of/for legal reasoning.
Exploring the limits, potential, and promise of legal doctrine as a method in light of today’s challenges is in itself, an intellectual and methodological project worth pursuing. And if it had taken an ‘AI revolution’ to have come to this, it would have been worth it.
Is this a field you would encourage law students to pay more attention to?
I would strongly encourage law students to understand the dynamic relationship between law and technology by studying its historical context and evolution. Whatever their particular focus or career path might be, students of law can gain valuable insights from a legal field that transgresses disciplinary and epistemic boundaries. Fundamentally, law and technology is not only a legal field, but a lens through which students of all legal disciplines can learn to ‘decode’ the world around them. I usually tell my students that even if you leave the class with more questions than answers, at least you will know how the device you have in your pocket actually works.
What excites you about the future of AI in Law?
Law is on the verge of a ‘scientific revolution’ (some say it’s been there for a long time). Teachers are exploring ways to teach and assess students in machine-resilient ways; judges are wondering about the value and legitimacy of legal texts entirely produced by machines; legal professionals are using AI tools-whilst training them in the process- to work faster but not necessarily less. At the same time, traditional assumptions and legal concepts of the western legal tradition (e.g. ‘human rights’ or ‘rule of law’) are being fundamentally challenged amidst a turbulent period of (geo)political transformations. In this process of legal and technological transformations, old mental maps are being discarded and new ways of (legal) thinking, teaching, and practicing germinate. Being in the discipline today feels a lot like floating in the air in search for new gravity forces to pull you and others together. Isn’t this exciting?