Digital Vulnerability as the New Category to Regulate the Human-Machine Interaction

The digital revolution is rapid in time and global in space, characterised by a variety of technologies and a multidimensional and multilayered nature. It presents challenges for the legal frameworks designed for a pre-digital world and need a forward-looking set of dynamic tools to be governed. Existing legal approaches differ by region and value system, struggling to keep pace with the AI’s pervasiveness and ubiquity. The paper analyses how EU, US, and China struggle to regulate the digital revolution. Current legal tools are showing their inadequacy in addressing power imbalances inherent in the first (algorithmic profiling) and second step (conversational agents) of HMI. Inspiring by the Digital Humanism, the paper proposes "digital vulnerability" as a key concept for regulating HMI. Declaring the ontological vulnerability of humans in any interaction with AI, making the concept of digital vulnerability a new macro-category in private law, and interpreting existing norms or drafting future ones on its basis could be the right legal tool to lay the foundation for a global digital law.