Cooperation, Law and Artificial Intelligence Technologies

The study starts from assumptions peculiar to cognitive sciences and evolutionary anthropology, which are not very common among legal scholars, at least in Italy, but are already present in many legal research methodologies as, for example, in naturalism or computational philosophy. In these areas the answer to the question ‘what is law’ is changing, fitting into the long history of the evolution of culture. The contemporary legal method, proper to normativism, was formed in recent times on the ideological assumptions of the bourgeois revolution and represents a type of law, written in laws, or, at any rate, in written texts of legislative origin. It does not take into account other ways of realizing law, which have occurred in past ages; in fact, the Gordian knot enveloping the ethical norm and the legal rule remains unresolved. In other ways, interpretation has opened up, far beyond the text, looking directly at values contained in constitutional principles. Anthropological studies root the origin of legal or ethical social relations in the homo sapiens in very ancient times, going all the way back to homo habilis. In this origin and throughout its history law has fulfilled the function of conflict settler and regulator of peace within a given social group, enabling a primate genetically predisposed to an authoritarian and hierarchical type of sociality to build large social groups. In this function, law reveals its hidden side: the primary protected good is not the person or human life, but social peace. Artificial Intelligence systems are information processing systems, they are in full development and are demonstrating their importance in legal systems. The questions that arise generally concern their inclusion in the ius dicere, ‘saying law’, be it as replacements for lawyers or judges. Certainly, they expand the technical ossibilities and thus make possible new forms of conflict treatment. It is not just a matter of replacing the judge or the lawyer, but of finding new forms and new procedures that cannot be managed if entrusted to a human being, also skipping the normativist approach that locks law into the text of law, but in accordance with the historical function of law.