Andrew Stawasz, Jeff Sebo
Discussions of animal law and legal longtermism often take place separately. That separation is misguided. Each field has much to gain from the other. In this post, we explain why animal law is important for legal longtermism. We then propose two general steps that legal longtermists can take to bridge these fields.
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Haydn Belfield, Shin-Shin Hua
Compute or computing power refers to a software and hardware stack, such as in a data centre or computer, engineered for AI-specific applications. We argue that the antitrust and regulatory literature to date has failed to pay sufficient attention to compute, despite compute being a key input to AI progress and services, the potentially substantial market power of companies in the supply chain, and the advantages of compute as a ‘unit’ of regulation in terms of detection and remedies.
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Christoph Bublitz, Christoph Winter
This post introduces a proposal to promote the long-term interests of humanity and to avert existential and other catastrophic risks, such as those resulting from extreme climate change, pandemics and unaligned artificial intelligence, through the adoption of a novel legal decision rule: in dubio pro futura. In the face of legal indeterminacy, when the law does not provide a single correct answer but a range of several acceptable answers, courts should choose the one most favorable to the future of humanity.
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Mark Eccleston-Turner
It is clear that humanity is not prepared for the next pandemic; the global health governance architecture requires fundamental change in order to get us to that point. If humanity is to be prepared for the next pandemic, we must fix the deep rooted, structural inequalities which are embedded within our global health system. The pandemic treaty is an opportunity to do this, but on the basis of the present proposals, and the manner in which the treaty is being developed, it is clear that the treaty will fall far short of such expectations.
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Shin-Shin Hua, Haydn Belfield
This post examines whether competition law can remain effective in prospective AI development scenarios by looking at six variables for AI development: capability of AI systems, speed of development, key inputs, technical architectures, number of actors, and the nature and relationship of these actors. For each of these, we analyse how different scenarios could impact effective enforceability. In some of these scenarios, EU competition law would remain a strong lever of control; in others it could be significantly weakened. We argue that despite challenges to regulators' ability to detect and remedy breaches, in many future scenarios the effective enforceability of EU competition law remains strong.
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Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann
The rules-based order necessary for realizing the sustainable development goals (SDGs) requires antagonistic, perennial struggles for justice challenging abuses of power and struggling for collective protection of the SDGs. Without such a ‘Sisyphus morality’ and stronger leadership from constitutional democracies for improving multilevel governance of global public goods, realization of the SDGs and protecting ‘human rights of all’ risk remaining a utopia.
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Abbie-Rose Hampton
Rapid levels of growth and development within the field of synthetic biology pose an undeniable threat to equity and global health justice as a result of the rise in the dematerialisation of pathogen samples. Until fairly recently, it was impossible to detach physical virus samples from the information they contained - the sample was the information - but technological advancements have allowed for the dematerialisation of pathogen samples to occur on a global scale. Whilst there are undoubtedly benefits to be derived from dematerialisation, it poses an existential threat to those international agreements which are underpinned by access and benefit sharing agreements.
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Daniel Bertram
When may a court legitimately rule over affairs of the future at all? Before thinking about how to resolve such cases, we need to clarify the conditions legitimatising the exercise of judicial authority. My (necessarily cursory) argument in this blogpost is twofold. First, I argue that it is both useful and conceptually apt to think about legitimate authority as a jurisdictional question. Second, I propose a heuristic condition that justifies the judicial exercise of extratemporal jurisdiction over future events: preserving choice.
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Sivan Shlomo-Agon, Michal Saliternik
In this blog post we challenge the reactive nature of international law, a discipline that has largely developed in response to specific crises and incidents, such as wars, pandemics, mass migrations, economic breakdowns, or technological advancements. While we acknowledge that the reactive paradigm of international law has facilitated adoption of pragmatic solutions to the concrete problems encountered and offered international law a path by which to direct its development, this approach, we contend, has led international law to be backward-looking, short-sighted, and ill-prepared to address newly emerging global threats and advances.
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Renan Araújo, Leonie Koessler
Constitutions worldwide have seen the rise of future generations. Considering the 193 UN member states, Kosovo, Palestine, and Taiwan, 41% (81 out of 196) of constitutions explicitly referenced future generations as of 2021. We find that this trend started in the early 1990s, lagging behind environmental constitutionalism by two decades. Why do constitutions increasingly refer to future generations? Based on a comprehensive data collection including all constitutions ever written, we argue that future generations are a significant part of a modern, universalist language of constitution-making.
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Oren Perez
The solution to many public dilemmas requires long-term effort by successive generations. Such situation arises whenever the solution to a public dilemma cannot be implemented instantaneously but is dependent on the continuous effort of future governments (and their citizens). In this post I discuss the problem of securing intergenerational cooperation, focusing on the challenge of designing long-term commitment mechanisms. I will also reflect briefly on the tension between commitment mechanisms and the democratic ideal of citizen sovereignty (allowing each generation to make its own choices).
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Ondrej Bajgar, Jan Horenovsky
With continuing proliferation of increasingly capable AI systems, we will need regulation to address the associated risks. Since our ability to foresee such future risks is very limited, our best bet is to base such regulation on relatively general principles, rather than narrow rules. We think that negative human rights with their existing broad international support could form a suitable foundation both for flexible regulation and for the associated technical solutions.
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Ammar Bustami
The traditional understanding of intertemporal law is not persuasive – a modified intertemporal approach to intergenerational equity is necessary. This approach would have to shift the perspective of intertemporal law from a retrospective present-past relationship to a future-oriented perspective. Instead of observing the evolutionary developments of law over time and retrospectively applying them at a certain point in the future, the new approach departs from the contemporary legal regime and attempts to anticipate its prospective evolutionary developments – with regard to intergenerational equity only.
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Gareth Davies
I want to focus on the question of what the future can do for us – a question less asked, and which may seem antithetical to the idea of responsible behaviour now, and yet which is simply a part of the idea of solidarity across time. Its practical importance is that it strengthens the relationship between the present and future and so gives a more persuasive and coherent basis for solidaristic behaviour now
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Matthijs Maas
If the development of certain technologies, such as advanced, unaligned AI, would be as dangerous as some have suggested, a long-termist legal perspective might advocate a strategy of technological delay—or even restraint—to avoid a default outcome of catastrophe. To many, restraint–a decision to withhold indefinitely from the development, or at least deployment, of the technology–might look implausible. However, history offers a surprising array of cases where strategically promising technologies were delayed, abandoned, or left unbuilt, even though many at the time perceived their development as inevitable.
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Eric Martínez, Christoph Winter
The past decade has seen a growing interest in protecting future generations from risks associated with climate change, pandemics, artificial intelligence, and other potential threats. Philosophical theories have developed in parallel, and those associated with the view that one should be particularly concerned with ensuring that the long-run future goes well have been referred to as longtermism. In the context of law, these theories form the basis for legal longtermism, the set of views associated with the claim that law and legal institutions ought to protect the far future. Based on a pair of recent empirical studies we show that legal experts and laypeople alike believe that the law should protect the long-term future much more than it currently does; that legal experts believe that the law can predictably and feasibly protect the long-term future; and that these beliefs hold true across major demographic subgroups.
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