This book is about artificial intelligence (AI), a field built on centuries of thought, which has been a recognized discipline for over 60 years. As well as solving practical tasks, AI provides tools to test hypotheses about the nature of thought itself. Deep scientific and engineering problems have already been solved and many more are waiting to be solved.

The principles of effectiveness and subsidiarity offer important guidance to the ECtHR. In interpreting the terms and notions of the various Convention provisions and in assessing the interference and justification of interferences, the Court further makes use of a number of other general principles and starting points. This chapter explains the most important of these principles, connecting them with the two main principles of effectiveness and subsidiarity. Attention is paid to the relevance of the rules of interpretation provided by the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and the special nature of the Convention as a ‘law-making treaty’. Subsequently, three principles are discussed that are of importance to the interpretation and determination of scope of the Convention. These are the notion that the ECHR is a ‘living instrument’, which must be interpreted in an evolutive and dynamic manner, the principle that the Convention should be interpreted in line with the underlying values of the Convention (‘meta-teleological interpretation’ in light of the principles of human dignity, personal autonomy, democracy, and pluralism) and the principle of autonomous interpretation.

It is not possible under Article 34 ECHR to lodge individual applications at the Court to complain about an interference with one’s Convention rights caused by non-State actors. Nevertheless, the Court has found various ways to extend the protection offered by the Convention rights to horizontal relations.

This chapter focuses on the scope of protection of the Convention in vertical and horizontal relations. First, the direct Convention responsibilities of the States in horizontal relations are explained. The point at which an organisation or institution can be regarded as a ‘public authority’ to be held directly accountable for respecting the Convention is discussed and it is explained that public authorities are always obliged to act in accordance with the Convention, even if they behave as private parties. Subsequently, it is set out how the Convention may have indirect horizontal effect. Attention is thereby paid in particular to the positive obligations of the State to provide effective regulation and enforcement in such horizontal relationships, as well as to the obligations for national courts to take the Convention rights into account when deciding on private law matters.

The Convention contains an inherent tension between, the one hand, the aim to provide effective protection of Convention rights and, on the other hand, the need for the ECtHR to allow sufficient freedom to the States and respect their special abilities and powers to make choices and decisions, also in light of the inherent indeterminacy of the Convention provisions. It is against this backdrop that the Court has developed its famous yet complex margin of appreciation doctrine, on which this chapter is focused. Insight is given into the development of this doctrine in the Court’s case law, its main rationale and functions, and the types of cases where the doctrine is (and is not) applied. In addition, the main factors determining the scope of the margin and their interaction are explained (common ground facter, better placed factor, nature and intensity of the interference). Finally, some attention is paid to the difference between doctrine and reality in the Court’s case law.

The fundamental rights laid down in the Convention can generally be classified as civil and political rights and liberties. These oblige the States to abstain from undue interference with the Convention rights and freedoms and therefore are called ‘negative obligations’. At the same time, the Court has recognised that States have so-called ‘positive’ obligations to provide effective protection of the Convention rights. The Court’s recognition and development of positive obligations has significantly contributed to the overall strength and scope of the protection offered by the Convention. This chapter focuses on the ways in which the Court generally defines positive obligations, i.e. applying the fair balance test, the reasonable knowledge and means test, an effectiveness-based test, and a test based on the Court’s own precedents. The Chapter further discusses different types of positive obligations - in particular substantive, preventive and procedural positive obligations - and the relation between positive and negative obligations. In addition, the incorporation of social and economic rights in the Convention through positive obligations is addressed.

For a restriction of a Convention right to be justified, it is not enough for it to have a sound legal basis and to pursue a legitimate aim. Restrictions of derogable Convention rights also must be shown to be ’necessary in a democratic society’ or ’proportionate’. Over time the Court itself has also defined a variety of specific tests and formulas to give shape to the tests of necessity and proportionality, which are all addressed in this chapter. The general test of necessity is explored first, paying special attention to the related pressing social need test, the ’relevant and sufficient’test and the least intrusive means test. Furthermore, the chapter discusses the fair balance test (a variant of proportionality in the strict sence) and some related tests, such as the individual and excessive burden test and core rights review. Attention is also paid to the related question of whether balancing should always be conducted on an individual and concrete basis on the national level, or whether blanket rules may sometimes suffice. Lastly, it is explored how procedural review can complement the Court’s substantive reasonableness review of restrictions.

Artificial intelligence is a transformational set of ideas, algorithms, and tools. AI systems are now increasingly deployed at scale in the real world [Littman et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2022a]. They have significant impact across almost all forms of human activity, including the economic, social, psychological, healthcare, legal, political, government, scientific, technological, manufacturing, military, media, educational, artistic, transportation, agricultural, environmental, and philosophical spheres.

How do you represent knowledge about a world to make it easy to acquire, debug, maintain, communicate, share, and reason with that knowledge? This chapter explores flexible methods for storing and reasoning with facts, and knowledge and data sharing using ontologies. As Smith points out, the problems of ontology are central for building intelligent computational agents.

This chapter discusses several key aspects and basics of the European Convention on Human Rights. First, it explains two main principles underlying the ECHR system as a whole: the principle of effective protection of fundamental rights and the principle of subsidiarity. In addition, the double role of the Court within the Convention system is set out, which is to offer individual redress or individual justice when Convention rights have been violated on the national level, and to clarify Convention rights standards (which is the Court’s constitutional role). The Chapter further addresses the three main stages of the Court’s review, which correspond to the structure of most of the Convention rights: (1) deciding on the applicability and interpretation of a Convention right; (2) determining if there is an interference with the right; (3) reviewing whether a justification can be given for this interference. Finally, a typology is provided of Convention rights according to the possibilities for restricting these rights, e.g. paying attention to absolute, non-derobable rights and distinguishing between different types derogable rights.

A reinforcement learning (RL) agent acts in an environment, observing its state and receiving rewards. From its experience of a stream of acting then observing the resulting state and reward, it must determine what to do given its goal of maximizing accumulated reward. This chapter considers fully observable (page 29), single-agent reinforcement learning.

This Chapter first explains what the ECtHR regards as the object of review in cases where an alleged violation of the Convention is caused by legislation: is this the legislation as such (which would invite general and more abstract review), or is it the individual decision applying this legislation (which would invite individualised and more concrete review), or perhaps both? The chapter then turns to discussing how the Court has tried to reconcile its task of offering individual justice and general constitutional interpretations. Specific attention is paid in this regard to the role of precedent-based reasoning in the Court’s case law and to case-based review, incrementalism and the development of general principles. Finally, the legal effect of these general principles is discussed (so-called ’res interpretata’ or force of interpretation), in contrast to the application thereof to the facts of the individual case.

This chapter considers simple forms of reasoning in terms of propositions – statements that can be true or false. Some reasoning includes model finding, finding logical consequences, and various forms of hypothetical reasoning. Semantics forms the foundations of specification of facts, reasoning, and debugging.