We live in a technological age in which artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly prevalent, whereby not only is a current moment recorded with several technological innovations, but above all new forms of relationships and interactions between people and non-people as well as between the real world and the virtual world are forming. In this sense, we are experiencing a new era in which humanoid robots are gaining space in social life and new scientific and social perspectives are emerging.

Artificial intelligence is already penetrating into the smallest and most private areas of our lives - Alexa, Siri and others are already at home in many living rooms and bedrooms and are happy to listen. Even in the field of computer games, social networks or the digital sex industry, human and non-human relationships are already merging.

This interlinking of the virtual and the real world, spurred on by improved AI technology, will continue to gain momentum, and of course this will have an impact on our social behavior. We will also increasingly experience real partnerships between people and machines, not only in Japan can you already notice such tendencies. As is so often the case, these developments have both good and dubious aspects, and the discussion about implications cannot be initiated early enough. Caring for the elderly, for example, poses great challenges for many countries.

Artificial intelligence and the law is a sub-area of artificial intelligence, mainly related to applications of AI to the problems of legal informatics and original research on these problems. Another direction is the transfer of tools and methods developed in the context of solving legal problems to the sphere of artificial intelligence as a whole. For example, theories of legal decisions, especially the argumentation models, contributed to the development of the representation of knowledge and reasoning; norm-based social organization models have contributed to the development of multi-agent systems; reasoning in the framework of paperwork contributed to the development of evidence; the need to store and then retrieve large amounts of textual data entailed a significant contribution to conceptual information retrieval and intelligent databases.