Philosophy and Intelligent Technologies: Logic and Ethics as the Engine of Legal Change. An essay in general theory of law and legal informatics.

This essay argues that intelligent technologies transform the law not as mere instruments, but as bearers of a twofold philosophical demand — logic and ethics — which operates as the true engine of legal change. Tracing the path from the Leibnizian calculemus and jurimetrics to the founding season of Italian legal informatics (Frosini, Losano, Borruso), it examines how computational logic has tested the formalisability of law — from deontic logic and expert systems to legimatics — and how ethics, from Jonas’s imperative of responsibility to Floridi’s ethics of AI, has been progressively positivised in the GDPR, the AI Act and Italian Law No. 132 of 2025. Through the phenomenon of techno-regulation, the debate on electronic personhood and the safeguards surrounding predictive justice, the essay shows that logic opens the space of legal possibilities, ethics selects within it, and positive law consecrates the selection: legal change, rightly understood, is their joint work.