Introduction

This chapter investigates the role of apologies issued by AIs – AIpologies – for AI regulation. It is therefore only appropriate to start the discussion with an apology: even though the chapter will try to bring some of Wittgenstein's ideas to the discussion, I am not a Wittgenstein scholar, and I apologize in advance that my discussions will overlook substantial parts of the contemporary Wittgenstein debate, or may even give a very idiosyncratic interpretation of his writing.

There has been substantial Wittgenstein reception in legal theory, centring on his conception of rules, rule-following and rule-interpretation. Some legal theorists such as Patterson found Wittgenstein's writing of great relevance to answer the question ‘What does it mean to say that a proposition of law is true?’ (Patterson 1999, 3). Others, like Scott Hershowitz (2002), or Brian Bix (2005) argued that legal rules and legal rule-following are too different from the examples discussed by Wittgenstein for the latter to be of much interest to legal theory. As Hershowitz put it, ‘nothing much can be learned about legal rules or legal interpretation by attending to Wittgenstein's remarks, because they were aimed at wholly different phenomena’ (2002, 619).

This debate in legal theory asks, and challenges, our very understanding of what law is, and how we can make sense of legal rules (or fail to do so). The aim of this chapter is more limited. It takes law and a functioning legal system as a given, and asks instead if we can learn something from Wittgenstein that can help us to interpret better one type of legal rules, rules that govern how we interact with increasingly autonomous machines.

If one were to adopt Tushnet's (1983) interpretation of Wittgenstein and deny with him the very possibility of rational adjudication between different interpretations of a law, this seems a futile endeavour, almost a self-contradiction. I will not try to address this issue for most of this chapter. Only in the final section, I will very briefly indicate how using James Tully's Wittgenstein interpretation could lead to a very different analysis of one of the examples that are at the focus of this chapter.