Computable Law

ongoing

The project addresses the regulation of computations (processes and systems) through an innovative legal & technological framework: it provides epistemic, technical and normative guidance for the de-velopment of computable laws and law compliant computations. The context is the ongoing transformation of the social world into a hybrid infosphere, populated by a huge and growing number of increasingly pervasive, autonomous and intelligent computational enti-ties. The scale, speed, ubiquity and autonomy of computations make it impossible for humans to di-rectly monitor them and anticipate all possible illegal computational behaviours. The law can hold the hybrid infosphere under its rule – providing protection, security and trust – only if it be-comes computation-oriented: legal and ethical requirements must be integrated with, mapped onto, and partially translated into, computable representations of legal knowledge and reasoning. Current legal culture still has not adequately addressed risks and potentials of computable law. My project will fill this gap, providing concepts, principles, methods and techniques and normative guide-lines to support law-abiding computations. It has the normative purpose to uphold the principle of rule of law, translating legal norms and legal values into requirements for computable laws and legally-responsive computational agents. My project will provide major methodological and substantive breakthroughs. On the one hand, it pro-poses a socio-technical methodology for regulatory design and evaluation, integrating three discipli-nary clusters: a social-legal one, a philosophical-logical one and a computing-AI one. On the other hand, it develops a framework including: (a) norms, legal values and principles for developers, de-ployers and users; (b) languages and methods to specify requirements of computations and norms directed to them; (c) cognitive architectures for legally-responsive computational agents.