PERSON
Frank Pasquale
The legal scholar who named the black box society—whose four new laws of robotics demand that AI complement rather than replace human expertise, stay honest about being a machine, avoid zero-sum arms races, and always name the people behind it.
Frank Pasquale is the lawyer who taught the machine to answer the oldest question in his discipline: who is responsible, who benefits, and who is being watched? Where engineers see capability, Pasquale sees
algorithmic governance—a system that sorts, scores, and denies without showing its workings. His 2015 book
The Black Box Society gave the AI age its sharpest diagnostic image: the one-way mirror, through which powerful institutions see everything about us while we see almost nothing about them. A decade later, in
New Laws of Robotics, he turned from diagnosis to prescription—proposing that the right question is not how smart our machines are but who they answer to, and insisting that
complementarity, not substitution, is the only acceptable relation between automation and human judgment. His work lands in the cycle at the precise moment that
large language models are being inserted into medicine, law, hiring, and policing—exactly the high-stakes domains where he has