IViR Lecture Series: From Autonomy to Ambiguity: Rethinking Law for Imperfect Humans

Modern law is built around a flattering idea of the human being: we are rational, autonomous individuals who know what we want, understand what is in our interests and should therefore be given ever more information, transparency and choice. But what if that picture is fundamentally wrong? We procrastinate, contradict ourselves and pursue incompatible desires. We want privacy and publicity, freedom and guidance, novelty and familiarity. We forget, misremember, reinvent ourselves and sometimes prefer a comforting fiction to an inconvenient truth. Artificial intelligence and other data-driven technologies do not simply threaten our autonomy. They magnify these contradictions: they help us understand and control ourselves while simultaneously exploiting our weaknesses, confronting us with our past and predicting futures we may never wish to know. Yet law responds by doubling down on the very ideal that technology destabilises. Faced with complexity, it gives us more information. Faced with manipulation, more consent. Faced with uncertainty, more transparency and accuracy.

This lecture asks whether the problem lies not only with technology, but with law’s image of the human being. What would regulation look like if it took our ambiguity seriously? Should there be a right to friction in a world obsessed with seamlessness? A right to fiction and forgetting in a world of perfect memory? Could paternalism sometimes protect autonomy better than consent? And should we occasionally be protected not only from others, but from our own choices? The answers are uncomfortable. That is precisely the point.

Bart van der Sloot specializes in questions revolving around law and technology, Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights. Bart studied both philosophy (BA; MA) and law (BA; MA) in the Netherlands and Italy, also successfully completing the Honours Research Programme. He is associate professor at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society of the University of Tilburg, Netherlands. Bart formerly worked for the Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam, where he wrote his Phd on privacy and virtue ethics, and for the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) (part of the Prime Minister’s Office of the Netherlands) to co-author a report on the regulation of Big Data. He has co-authored several policy reports for the European Union, the Dutch government and other governmental agencies. Bart van der Sloot is the general editor of the European Data Protection Law Review and served as the director of the Privacy & Identity Lab between 2016-2021. Between 2010-2020, he was the founder and coordinator of the Amsterdam Platform for Privacy Research (APPR), the minor Privacy Studies and the Amsterdam Privacy Conferences 2012, 2015 and 2018. Bart has won three prestigious academic awards: the NWO Top Talent Grant, the NWO Veni Grant and the KNAW Early Career Award. The Top Talent Grant fully covered his Phd project and the Veni grant (2021-2025) covers a research project called: the right to be let alone … by yourself.