PERSON
Gillian Hadfield
The economist-lawyer who reframes the hardest question of the AI age—not whether we can build
intelligent machines, but whether we can build the legal and normative infrastructure inside which intelligent machines must operate, and whether we can build it fast enough.
Gillian Hadfield arrived at artificial intelligence by an unusual path: she is simultaneously a lawyer and an economist, and both disciplines trained her to see rules not as given constraints but as designed systems that can fail. Her foundational insight, developed in her 2017 book
Rules for a Flat World, is that law is a technology—humanity's oldest and most underrated one, invented to solve the problem of cooperation among strangers, refined and elaborated over millennia, and now catastrophically obsolete when confronted with systems that iterate at machine speed. Legislatures move in years; frontier models move in months; the gap between them is not a regulatory lag to be closed by incremental effort but a structural mismatch that demands a different
kind of rule-making apparatus altogether. This diagnosis led her to propose
regulatory markets—a mechanism that harnesses the speed and expertise of private competition while preserving the legitimacy and accountability of public outcomes—and,