Laws have always evolved in response to technological change. We've had a long tradition of this sort of change ever since the Industrial Revolution. We are standing on the threshold of a similar technological shift, and our legal system is likely to change yet again.

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There is a long-standing view that law is part of the natural order of society. Thinkers like Aristotle and Cicero believed human laws mirrored the laws of nature. Hobbes claimed that society itself was made possible by law, while Locke argued that legal norms arose from a moral order preceding it. Yet, in practice, much of what governs us today has not evolved from timeless principles, but as a reaction to technology—a continual response to the disruptions it introduces.

The Industrial Revolution was the first major transformation of the whole of society. It replaced human power with mechanical, and spawned a number of “macroinventions” that changed how society operated. As machines replaced human labour, the accidents and injuries they caused forced common law courts to re-evaluate doctrines that had worked so far in an agrarian, pre-industrial context.

Nowhere is this more visible than in common law, which has repeatedly evolved in response to technological upheaval. Where it used to impose near-automatic liability for harm caused by a person's actions, post-industrialisation, it adopted fault-based negligence requiring plaintiffs to prove the breach of a duty of care to hold defendants liable. In time, the duty of care principle was extended to protect individuals holding manufacturers liable for injuries caused to consumers, even if they had no direct contract with them.

Technological advancements in transportation and telecommunications made it possible for business to be conducted at a distance. This forced courts to change the way they thought about contract law, giving rise to the “mailbox rule”, which held that acceptance of a contract was effective once posted, even if the letter was delayed or lost in transit. Future evolutions in communication technology tested this idea, and while it was extended to contracts concluded over the telegraph, it was denied to the more instantaneous telephone technology. Mass production transformed the nature of contracting itself, making standard-form agreements and boilerplate terms the norm. As courts came to appreciate that large industries had an unequal bargaining power, they began to temper the egregious excesses of these contracts through the doctrine of unconscionability and laws of consumer protection.

But no law has been more directly influenced by changes in technology than intellectual property, which came into being because of it. The Statute of Anne, widely recognised as the world's first copyright law, was enacted to offer authors (and their publishers) exclusive rights over their works because the technology of the printing press had made it relatively trivial for anyone to generate multiple copies of it. When engravings on metal plates made it easy to mass-produce art, this right was extended to images, and to music, when the descendants of Johann Sebastian Bach asserted copyright over the sheet music of his compositions. Each subsequent creative technology forced society to revisit the ways in which intellectual property law was being applied, incrementally shifting the scope and extent of regulation in response to what technology made possible.

We stand, today, on the verge of another technological shift. Just as the Industrial Revolution rewrote the legal framework as it then existed, artificial intelligence is likely to upend much of the legal system as we know it today. This will present itself in many different ways.

Autonomous vehicles and robotic tools are already testing the boundaries of existing liability doctrines. When a self-driving car causes an accident or an AI-powered medical tool results in harm to patients, traditional doctrines of foreseeability and proximate cause may no longer be useful. AI behaves in unpredictable and emergent ways, and manufacturers may try to escape liability by claiming that it is impossible to reasonably foresee what AI-powered devices will do.

At the same time, the integration of AI into professional workflows may end up redefining what is considered “reasonable care.” When that happens, doctors who fail to consult AI for a second opinion, or lawyers who omit to run their advice through AI for a reference check, may be deemed to have failed to do what was expected of them as professionals.

As AI agents proliferate, the offer and acceptance framework that, to this day, defines how contracts are concluded may no longer apply. Future workflows will call for multiple agents to interact in numerous ways that simply cannot be anticipated in advance, making each agreement a combination of hundreds of micro-arrangements concluded between autonomous AI systems to achieve a larger task.

But it is in the area of intellectual property that we are likely to see the most dramatic change. AI is increasingly being used in the creative process, giving rise to entirely new forms of expression and novel methods of production. While creators may take time to adapt, adapt they will, and the law will have no option but to keep pace with these changes. The purpose of intellectual property law has always been to incentivise the act of creation. But AI will challenge long-standing distinctions between human authorship and machine-generated content, forcing courts and policymakers to grapple with how and if legal personhood should attach to algorithmic creativity.

Just as steam and steel once reshaped the legal system, AI will as well. It is not a question of whether the law will change, but when.