Science fiction, science and fiction of and for algorithmic agents in law

Questions of the legal and moral agency and responsibility of artificially intelligent entities are becoming increasingly pressing. Works of science fiction imagine numerous possibilities regarding the role and treatment of algorithmic agents in future societies and raise (metaphysical) questions about what it takes to truly be an agent. The chapter turns from science fiction to science and finds that the (metaphysical) understanding of human beings as paradigmatic agents that emerges from the current best scientific theories is one of (highly complex) physical creatures who, through their ascriptions of agency and responsibility, create responsible agents. What are the implications for law? On one reading, very few. This is because law – by means of legal fictions or social ontology, depending on one's theoretical framing – is constitutive of (the legal) part of our social reality, including agency and responsibility ascriptions, irrespective of metaphysics. Given that the law can – by means of fiction – create parts of reality, the chapter argues that the important question is what kind of fictions we want to make real. This is a question that can be explored through science fiction, which brings the chapter full circle, from science fiction to science to fiction and back.