The ever-growing involvement of InsurTech in the insurance operations requires us to consider the question of the level of disruption that the new technologies may have had on the insurance services, and therefore on society. To answer this question, the areas of insurance services in which InsurTech has been predominantly employed are explored. Following that, the social and economic impact of InsurTech is discussed together with the fundamental principles that guide the business and legal operation of insurance services.

This chapter introduces basic concepts of AI to lawyers, deals with key concepts, the capabilities and limitations of AI, and identifies technological challenges which might require legal responses.

AI will greatly challenge product liability since it is based on assumptions as to physical objects distributed through organised linear value chains which do not necessarily apply in the AI context. AI systems further challenge both liability compartmentalisation based on separate risk spheres and the notion of defectiveness. The European Product Liability Regime is based on a linear value chain, whereas with AI, systems may be distributed differently. The realities of new value chains call for a number of adjustments to central product liability concepts, which will widen the scope of product liability rules. Further, AI may in fact have the potential to ultimately dissolve the very notion of product liability itself.

Data is one of the most valuable resources in the twenty-first century. Property rights are a tried-and-tested legal response to regulating valuable assets. With non-personal, machine-generated data within an EU context, mainstream IP options are not available, although certain types of machine generated data may be protected as trade secrets or within sui generis database protection. However, a new IP right is not needed. The formerly proposed EU data producer’s right is a cautionary tale for jurisdictions considering a similar model. A new property right would both strengthen the position of de facto data holders and drive up costs. However, with data, there are valuable lessons to be learned from constructed commons models.

Whether AI should be given legal personhood should not be framed in binary terms. Instead, this issue should be analysed in terms of a sliding-scale spectrum. On one axis, there is the quantity and quality of the bundle of rights and obligations that legal personhood entails. The other axis is the level of the relevant characteristics that courts may include in conferring legal personhood.

The conferral of personhood is a choice made by legal systems, but just because it can be done, does not mean that it should. Analogies made between AI systems and corporations are superficial and flawed. For instance, the demand for asset partitioning does not apply to AI systems in the same way that it does with corporations and may lead to moral hazards. Conferring personhood on AI systems would also need to be accompanied with governance structures equivalent to those that accompany corporate legal personhood. Further, the metaphorical ghost of data as property needs to be exorcised.

Human rights online are distorted versions of human rights offline. This distortion appears in various formats and properties and will be the subject of the present monograph. The image of the non-coherence theory can be presented for the purposes of introduction through three non-legal lenses: Aristotelian logic, Plato’s myth of the cave, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

The first question to be asked is whether the division of rights into absolute and relative is retained in the digital domain. A positive reply shows an image where the basic human rights architecture has no variance, and such variance can appear in the scope of these two areas; in other words, whether the circle of absolute rights online is substantially wider or narrower than offline. This means that the notions of dignity, personal freedom and equality appear online undistorted in comparison with the offline domain. Yet doubts can be raised due to the relativisation of the core values thesis. There does not appear any non-coherence between the idea of dignity in online and offline spaces due to the absence of abstract definitions. Both domains rely on an intuitionistic justification of dignity. There may occur non-coherence regarding the absolute nature of dignity since the offline rights environment is multilayered, but it is not certain that the online environment is.

Mart Susi’s Internet Balancing Formula is completely different from the Weight Formula. It is not general but highly particular, and it is not abstract but highly concrete. And it must be particular and concrete. In offline balancing the substantive dimension can and must be delegated to argumentation. Here the Weight Formula is a form of legal argumentation. In contrast to this, rational online balancing is only possible on the basis of a solid substantive input. Precisely this Susi attempts to provide with his Internet Balancing Formula. The main critiques are related to the elements of internet vulnerability and the element of empathy.

The ontological dimension of human rights in the digital domain concerns its theoretical foundations and the content of human rights norms. Based on the Aristotelian theory of epistemology, this represents the side of objective reality. The non-coherence theory of digital human rights explores the ontology of human rights at various levels of generality. Eight justification models articulated for the human rights offline domain will be applied to digital human rights. If the implicitness of human rights online were to originate from this same online domain, it could no longer be viewed through non-coherence theory, as it would represent an entirely independent and separate paradigm of meanings. Since the online world is determined by technical possibilities, we can formulate a hypothesis that the gap between the implicit and explicit dimensions of human rights online are by default narrowing since these elements of implicitness, which cannot be realised online, are simply rejected.

The argument of non-coherence can be useful for explaining two principally different approaches about the interrelationship between constitutional principles originating from the offline reality and their applicability in the online domain. The first says that the constitutional ideas of the digital domain originate from the offline domain, and the second says that they do not, their origin being from inside the online domain in isolation from the offline. The process of the transposition of human rights law from one domain to another, including constitutional principles, has three stages. The first has to do with the reasons for such a transposition. The second stage is the emergence of ideas and subsequent discourse saying that something in human rights law and/or practice has to be changed in order to provide adequate protection online. The third stage of the transposition of offline fundamental rights to the online domain is the acceptance of new rights or principles, or conversely, the rejection of claims due to the absence of their necessity.

This monograph is about the change in meaning and scope of human rights rules, principles, ideas and concepts, and the interrelationships and related actors, on moving from the physical domain into the online domain. The transposition into the digital reality can alter the meaning of well-established offline human rights to a wider or narrower extent; it can turn positivity into negativity and vice versa. The digital human rights realm has different layers of complexity in comparison with the offline realm.

Non-coherence theory says the boundaries of traditional fundamental rights either become broader or narrower once transposed into the digital context, and this has also been shown previously. There are two images which at first sight appear almost the opposite of one another. The first reflects almost total freedom of expression unrestrained in practice, and the second almost the total absence of such freedom due to e-technologies which have the function of transparency and perpetuating everything which has been recorded or done. The first is a feature of social media and the second of blockchain technologies. These images may seem incompatible but are additionally explainable through the proportionality deficit paradox. Proportionality as a human rights instrument becomes distorted and weakened in the digital domain. The fragmentation stems from the loss of its holistic capacity to be applied anywhere relative rights collide online. The distortion means a breakage of the link between the outcome and the proportionality principle. The concept of proportionality between online and offline human rights domains exhibits wide non-coherence.

There are several theoretical frameworks that may be useful when approaching the question of whether new human rights claims have emerged in the digital domain. The chapter relies on three: Phil Alston’s quality control doctrine, H. L. Hart’s seminal categorisation of rights into primary and secondary and finally, the universality and abstractness decrease thesis. The chapter puts forward the weakness of connection thesis from analysis of social media companies’ community standards. Network rules of operation are often highly specific and have a weak connection to generally accepted human rights values and principles. This appears to be a common feature of the published rules of operation on social media networks. One may say here that human rights rhetoric and normativity lose their promise of being problem-solvers in the digital domain. Here non-coherence is clear. And it leaves open the question of whether something else has taken over the functionality of human rights.