New Kids on the Law Block?

‘Control, Alt, Delete, username, password’ is what we do automatically, every day, and without further thought, in order to gain access to the digital world. Failure to comply? Access denied! New information and communication technologies permeate our lives to such an extent that we take them for granted. Given the perspective that guides this book, I am interested in how, as recipients and users of new technologies not of our own design, our perceptions of the world and our epistemological assumptions are influenced. If Alberto Manguel was right when he proposed that ‘a culture is defined by what it can name’, what does that mean for the (re)invention of the human, and what are its effects on law?

Would Shakespeare, fond as he was of twin images, recognise a digital representation of the human of the kind described as ‘Digital-Me’, a device as of yet a fantasy beyond contemporary ‘smart’ home devices, but a very serious one. It hints at what mobile communication and data mining can accomplish together: a human's digital replica as a kind of personal assistant, impersonating its busy owner and programmed to perform his or her simpler tasks; in doing so, it takes its owner's decisions independently, as if it were he or she, and it also ‘knows’ when to ‘switch on’ the real human. In order to continue the discussion of questions pertaining to a humanistic view of technology, this chapter starts by highlighting, however briefly, significant developments in digital and/or smart technologies in the legal environment. It does so, because the task of philosophy is not to make life easy, but, as in Chapter 12, to ask awkward questions, specifically of the kind that judicial phronèsis needs in order to be able to develop. The rest of this chapter is dedicated to the issues concerning individual authenticity and privacy, raised in, and by, Juli Zeh's dystopian novel The Method.

Contemporary legal-philosophical views on profiling, government surveillance, data mining, or, generally, artificial intelligence (AI) and ambient intelligence (AmI) as interrelated technological visions are the new kids on the law block, so to speak. As computational models of human behaviour and/or cognitive processes, processes of profiling and/or data mining − aimed at discovering correlations of data of groups or one individuated subject − use algorithms to arrive at results in the form of predictions about human behaviour.