‘Connecting Law and Technology’

The IT research, and especially the AI and Cognitive Sciences studies, have changed the relation between law and technology. Technique and Law are sets of rules directed to change the ‘natural’ environment, both of things and humans. Both types of rules are directed to behaviours of humans: A- The technological rules stating how to BEHAVE in order to build technological objects and to let them work (doing the work for which they are planned for) B- The legal rules stating how to BEHAVE interacting with other people handling old and new objects. The two types of rules can generate conflicts in what they order as due behaviour because they overlap in a contradicting way: they partially rule the same domain, but the goals that they are intended to reach are different. Something has changed with the Information Technologies, especially with distributed artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics. Technology has not only widened its overlapping fields with law. It is evident today, less so few years ago, that the object of Cybernetics, robotics and so on, as sciences of control and direction of action, really overlaps with that of law. Cybernetics, like law, is the science of controlling the action of others: if we want, we can expose this more neutrally with Kelsen: 'norms are the senses of acts of will addressed to other people's behaviour'