This book is about public administration’s decision-making (and policy development activity) in the context of an increasingly ICT-driven environment. Already today, AI systems can analyse data more accurately than humans and help them examine prior decisions. However, Artificial Intelligence lacks the imaginative component needed to invent the future (public policy development) and imagine the future (single-case decision-making), which is so far solely a human brain prerogative and a result of its ability to infer from seemingly unrelated situations and events. Single-case decision-making requires adapting a general and abstract rule to a specific scenario; therefore, even technical knowledge is insufficient. Moreover, despite the diversity of ADM technology and the rapid pace of technological development, basic legal requirements for public decision-making must remain unchanged and fixed in principles of the rule of law and good administration.

In addition to the approval of the EU Regulation 2024/1689 on Artificial Intelligence on June 13, 2024, the new element compared to the first edition is the familiarity that people, or a significant segment of the population, have gained with Artificial Intelligence in the interim, thanks to the spread of tools such as ChatGPT, Bing, and so on. In some ways, it is as if the I.A. had made available to many a new ability, individual or collective, to enjoy or defend, by imposing on one another the elaboration or disclosure of new constraints and obligations, rights and powers as a result of the new benefits and associated risks that new or past technologies inevitably entail.