An insight in the legal challenges and opportunities of Artificial Intelligence (AI). By Matthias Dobbelaere-Welvaert, managing partner of theJurists Europe.

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E-COMMERCE
EN RECHT
Matthias Dobbelaere-Welvaert
Praktische juridische tips

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AI & Legal
Matthias Dobbelaere-Welvaert
@deJuristen
“Alexa, how about the
legal aspects of AI?”

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About
theJurists
theJurists is specialized in privacy, digital law,
intellectual property law and company law.
theJurists believes in digital transformation and
artificial intelligence, and works hard on
projects that aim at making the law accessible
to all. We stand for open, transparent and
innovative law.
Gent - Brussel - London - Paris - Amsterdam
theJurists Europe is a contemporary legal
boutique office and has been a pioneer in
digital law for eight years.

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About
Matthias
MATTHIAS DOBBELAERE-WELVAERT
Matthias is the Managing Partner of theJurists Europe,
with offices in Gent, Bruxelles, Amsterdam, Paris and
London. He is a member of the FeWeb Board. He
teaches Copyright and Mediarights at the EHB.
Matthias specialises in artificial intelligence, online
privacy and freedom of speech. He recently founded
‘DOBBELAERE WELVAERT’, a consulting agency
focused towards disruption in the legal industry.
theJurists Europe.
MANAGING PARTNER
Twitter: @deJuristen

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Alexa?
Start this keynote please.

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2018: AI
AI & Machine Learning
will revolutionise old-
fashioned industries.
Accountancy, legal, manufacturing,
retail or logistics.

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AI and Life
The (US) ’AI and Life in 2030’
report notes that AI has the
potential to challenge any
number of legal assumptions in
the short, medium and long
term.

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The fourth
industrial revolution
will bring huge
legal challenges.
Governments and policy makers around the
world are starting to grasp what AI means for
law and policy, and the necessary technical and
legal frameworks.
The European Parliament published earlier a
draft report on Robotics proposing an
advanced robot registration system managed
by an EU Agency for Robotics and AI. It’s also
working on a ‘kill switch’ legislation for robots.

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AI is already
everywhere.
I have no doubt this tech-savvy audience is
aware that AI systems are already everywhere,
from bank apps that let us deposit checks with
a picture (or a Face ID), to everyone’s favourite
Snapchat filter, to our handheld mobile
assistants.
However, lawmakers are not. Currently, one of
the next big challenges that they’re tackling are
the ethical, philosophical, sociological and legal
implications of this AI technology.

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Autonomous
vehicles
Vehicle autonomy: a
poster child for AI in
motion

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Case Study:
Autonomous
Vehicles
It’s the combination of machine learning,
machine perception and machine control.
‘Autonomous’ here means that the vehicle itself
is capable with little or no human intervention
of making decisions about all its activities:
steering, accelerating, braking, lane positioning,
routing, complying with traffic signals etc.
Since the first UK Locomotive (‘Red Flag’) Act in
1861, humans have been at the centre of
vehicle road driving regulation, whether for
speed limits, driving standards, driving licences,
vehicle registration or roadworthiness.
The removal of human control of motor vehicles
that autonomous vehicles predicates is
therefore set to transform over 150 years of
national and international vehicle, road and
traffic legislation and regulation.

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Quality: setting a framework for quality
inspection and control (Some of Tesla’s code is
open source for example). How to guarantee
durable quality?
Insurance: amendments need to be made to
primary legislation to ensure insurance
products will be available for automated
vehicles;
Regulation: clarifying provisions for the
construction and use of near to market
technologies (presently, remote control parking)
through changes to regulations;
Highway Code: providing guidance for drivers
about the safe and appropriate use of new
ADAS technologies, as well as specific advice in
the Highway Code about separation distances
for vehicles driving as platoons.

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WHAT IF YOUR TESLA
IS A SILENT KILLER?
ARE YOU WILLING TO
SACRIFICE YOUR LIFE
FOR SOMEONE
ELSE’S?
Ethics and legality of
AI and robots.

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Smart
contracts
the blockchain
background

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Case Study:
Smart
contracts
The blockchain is a comprehensive, always up
to date accounting record or ledger of who
holds what or who transferred what to whom.
The ‘what’ in the blockchain is virtually
anything that can be recorded – physical assets
or electronic cash (the rationale of Bitcoin, the
blockchain’s orginator), other financial
instruments, and records of government
interaction with citizens.
The blockchain paves the way for ‘smart
contracts’, software code representing a self-
executing contract as an arrangement that the
computer can make, verify, execute and enforce
automatically under conditions set in advance.
The software can also be used to make and
execute chains or bundles of contracts linked to
each other, all operating autonomously and
automatically.

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Benefits and
uses?
Smart contracts promise a range of benefits
including lower costs, latency and error rates
(through greater automation, less
intermediation and less direct manual
involvement) and are likely to enable new
business and operating models.
Smart contracts represent evolution not
revolution (look at e- and m-commerce).
Smart contracts take this to the next level by
further reducing individual human intervention
and increasing codification. Areas of potential
use include securities and financial instrument
clearing and settlement (financial services),
insurance claim processing (financial services),
electronic patient records (healthcare) and
royalty distribution (music and media).

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User level,
key issues
Clarity about the extent of contracting
authority that the user is conferring on the
platform operator’s smart contract system;
Evidential requirements (including auditing,
record generation/retention and access to/
return of data) where the smart contract
platform makes and performs commitments
entered into in the user’s name;
Regulatory issues: control/processing of
personal data; system security; regulatory
authorisation and compliance requirements -
for all/any other platform users, etc; and
The normal range of contract lifecycle issues:
including performance/availability, liability and
risk; conditionality/dependencies; and supplier
dependence and exit management.

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AI & Legal Services
AI is penetrating legal
services. How law firms
will cope with this?

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THE LEGAL
PROFESSION
IS ON THE CUSP OF
TRANSFORMATION
Will lawyers be
replaced by
computers?

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A B2B legal services AI
applies machine learning
incorrectly leading to errors?
What if…
A car, ambulance and bus -
all operating autonomously -,
collide at a road intersection?
AI is used for medical and
health care diagnostics and
procedures (sensitive data)?
Multiple robots work with
each other at home?

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No, AI is not ‘I, Robot’.
First, the tendency to humanise AI computer
systems (which could be called the ‘I Robot fallacy’) –
to think of robots and AI as analogous to humans
and the human brain - can be misleading. A more
helpful analogy is with big data and the software
that processes that data
Second, AI systems, particularly when in motion and
especially in popular culture, have been analogised
to agents (the ‘agency fallacy’), and from there it has
only been a short jump to seek to confer rights on
and impute duties to these systems as agents. An AI
system of itself, at present anyway, is not a legal
person and so cannot be an agent.
Three
common
miscon-
ceptions

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And finally, the DAO’s or
‘Decentralised Autonomous
Organisations’
A third misconception (the ‘entity fallacy’) is to speak
of platforms like decentralised autonomous
organisations (DAOs), as possessing separate legal
personality and able to act independently of their
promoters or owners. Generally, as the law currently
stands, such an organisation could be expressly
incorporated as a separate legal entity as a company
or a partnership, where its shareholders or other
members would be other legal entities (individuals or
companies). Such a body would behave legally like
any other limited liability company or partnership.
This is not to say that AI will not lead to the
development of new types of legal entity.

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What to do?
Amend old legislation,
make new ones, what
role should a central
government play?

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AI is giving
governments
much to grapple
with.
The US ‘Future of AI’ report sets out risk based
public protection and economic fairness as
the key regulatory interests, using current
regulation as the start point where possible
and not stifling innovation.

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Influence of
existing
policy
An important policy question for government
is whether to bring together its AI expertise
together centrally or whether to decentralise
across government departments.
The US ‘Future of AI’ report appears to
advocate common goals for the US federal
government and agencies rather than
centralisation.
In the UK, the committee notes that “it is too
soon to set down sector-wide regulations in
this nascent field” and favours the
establishment of a standing Commission on AI.

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AI and
intellectual
property
AI will provide a significant impulse to the
development of intellectual property law.
Particularly as machine and cognitive learning
start to enable computers to generate new
works and invent novel ways of doing things.
Who will be the owner of this intellectual
property? The AI or it’s ‘keeper’?

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AI and
privacy?
AI already tracks and predicts individuals’
shopping preferences, political preferences, and
locations. The data accumulated and shared
between these technologies has already
created many controversies within the legal
field. However, AI is starting to tackle more
controversial subjects, such as predicting
sexuality and propensity to commit a crime
(think ‘Minority Report’).
Will these predictions be able to be used in
trial? Or will the AI serve as experts, to be cross-
examined to determine the validity of their
opinions?

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Hype alert!
Dubai appointed a
‘Minister for Artificial
Intelligence’.

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Do we need
a AI Minister?
I highly doubt we need a Minister in every
country to oversee the technological evolution
of AI. We do need, however, more
understanding of what AI will bring, on a
political, legal, sociological and philosophical
level.

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The real danger of
the fourth revolution.
No, Elon,
it’s not killer robots.

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Yes, we need
to talk about
‘UBI’.
Billionaire serial entrepreneur Richard Branson
says cash handouts will eventually be required
to keep people from becoming homeless in the
US. "I think with the coming on of AI and other
things there is certainly a danger of income
inequality,”
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates echoed this
sentiment recently. "AI is just the latest in
technologies that allow us to produce a lot
more goods and services with less labor," says
Gates, speaking with "Hamilton" composer Lin-
Manuel Miranda and his wife, Melinda, at
Hunter College in New York City earlier in
February. "AI will bring us immense new
productivity."

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"There is a pretty good chance we end up with
a universal basic income, or something like that,
due to automation," says Elon Musk. "Yeah, I am
not sure what else one would do. I think that is
what would happen."
Additionally, Facebook founder Mark
Zuckerberg promoted the idea of universal
basic income during his commencement
speech to Harvard in May. "Now it's our time to
define a new social contract for our generation.
We should explore ideas like universal basic
income to give everyone a cushion to try new
things," says Zuckerberg.

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So perhaps there lies the
biggest and most important
challenge. Providing in an era
where human workers are often
rendered without purpose.

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There is still some time
left.
2018
Life & Legal will never be the
same again.
Life in
2030

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