Artificial cosmoi and the law (2nd edition)

A workshop organized by the Centre for Law, Economics & Society, UCL Faculty of Laws, Yale Law School & the Faculty of Law, University of Athens

About this workshop

Transformative general-purpose technologies have resulted in the “fourth industrial revolution”: Blockchain, Big Data and Data Science, gene editing through CRISPR, Artificial Intelligence and machine learning. Robots are leading to rapid changes in the way services are offered, products are manufactured, and commerce is made, leading to the emergence of new industries/spheres of economic activity.  Data collection is very extensive. There are legitimate concerns on privacy violations, and a need to a regulatory solution to guard privacy without killing the benefits of digital platforms. A new key area of business activity, platforms, bring together disparate sets of users, such as cardholder and merchants in a credit card platform or drivers and customers in Uber. Currently, the five most valuable firms in the world (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) are platforms. The development of blockchain and decentralised ledger technology may challenge the dominance of digital platforms and lead to a more decentralised economic system. “Winner-take-most” competition with the emergence of “superstar firms” may raise competition concerns but has also arguably led to a decline in labour’s share. Automation may relieve humans from certain tasks, so that they can spend time on more valuable work, or it can lead to the splitting up of activity previously exercised by humans in various activities, some of which may be automated. It can eventually replace an entire job once performed by a human, thus having important implications on employment in certain economic sectors and/or social inclusion.

Legal systems have been conspicuously slow in adapting to the needs of society and to the development of new technologies. When, even with delay, law reacts to societal changes, it usually has just a restricting function: it prohibits rather than enables certain types of activities. Thus, the law is a rather poor instrument in dealing with the cataclysmic changes brought by the very rapid developments in technology. These touch upon all aspects of social life, ranging from issues of employment and intellectual creation, or more generally the creation of resources, to new modes of data and AI-driven governance, affecting multiple environments, reaching from the streets and hospitals to the financial system and the battlefield. For the law to remain relevant, it will have to rapidly adapt to these challenges, so it can remain at the epicenter rather than the periphery of social and business activity. It is also important that technology entrepreneurs be cognizant of the crucial importance of the legal system and of the necessity of adaptive changes to it when designing their business models, since ignoring the role of the law may jeopardize their innovative efforts and disruptive innovations. The second edition of the “Artificial cosmoi and the Law” conference aims to explore the interactions between law and new general purpose technologies, such as blockchain, Artificial Intelligence and gene-editing, but also more broadly to reflect on the legal construction of digital capitalism.

Participants

• Emilios Avgouleas, Chair in International Banking Law and Finance, University of Endiburgh
• George Dimitropoulos, Assistant Professor, HBKU
• Nick Economides, Professor at NYU Stern Business School
• Hamid Ekbia, Professor of informatics, Indiana University Bloomington
• George Flouris, Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FO.R.T.H.)- Institute of Computer Science (I.C.S.)
• Sotiris Georganas, Reader in Behavioural Economics City University London
• Carsten Gerner Beurle, Professor of Commercial Law, UCL
• Yiannis Golias, Rector, National Technical University of Athens
• David Grewal, Professor of Law, Yale Law School
• Christos Hadjiemmanuil, Professor of International and European Monetary and Financial Institutions at the University of Piraeus & Visiting Professor, Department of Law, LSE
• Alexey Ivanov, Director, HSE Skolkovo Institute for Law & Development
• Michael Jacobides, Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship; Sir Donald Gordon Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, London Business School
• Aggelos Kiayias, Chair in Cyber Security and Privacy and director of the Blockchain Technology Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh
• Mihalis Kritikos, Policy Analyst, European Parliament
• Ioannis Lianos, Chair in global competition law and public policy, Director of the Centre for Law, Economics and Society, UCL
• Bjorn Lundqvist, Associate professor of Law, University of Stockholm
• Manos Mastromanolis, Assistant Professor of Commercial Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Athens
• Alexandra Mikroulea, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the Athens University
• Greg Pelecanos, Partner, Ballas, Pelecanos LLP
• Alexandros Seretakis, Assistant Professor, Trinity College Dublin
• Kostantinos Stylianou, Lecturer in Competition Law and Regulation, University of Leeds
• Dimitris Tzouganatos, Professor of Competition Law at the University of Athens, Faculty of Law
• Nikos Vettas, General Director of the Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research IOBE & Professor of Economics, Athens University of Economics & Business
• Alexandros Varveris, Special Laboratory Educational Staff and Deputy Director of the Lab of Law and Informatics, Law School, UoA,
• Angela Walch, Associate Professor at St. Mary’s University School of Law
• Georgios Yannopoulos, Assistant Professor for IT Law and Legal Informatics, Director of the Lab of Law and Informatics, Law School, UoA,