When algorithms rule: AI, code, and the erosion of legal order

Abstract

This article explores how artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmic infrastructures are reshaping law, society, and human judgement. AI introduces a new logos—a rationality distinct from human reason—producing autonomous agents with “subjectivity without a subject” that challenge traditional hierarchies and authority. Blockchain, digital networks, and algorithmic systems shift regulation from politics to technology, privileging efficiency, procedural correctness, and ubiquity over meaning, reflection, and human deliberation. Legal norms are detached from context, disputes are standardised, and speed replaces the temporal and interpretive frameworks essential to justice. Digital writing, mute and opaque, calculates without understanding, rendering systemic irresponsibility inherent. As AI absolutises its methods, human judgement is progressively displaced, reducing humans to No-One in relation to the Otherness they have created. Invoking Kant’s dove, the article underscores that law, like flight, depends on space, time, and language. Fully delegating decisions to machines risks eroding responsibility, human subjectivity, and the interpretive foundations of law, revealing AI as a profound epistemological and ontological challenge.