Seven AI Laws:The Future of Mankind
Prashant Mali · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
Seven AI Laws: The Future of Mankind is an open-access monograph proposing a constitutional framework for the governance of artificial intelligence. Written by a tech jurist for an audience of judges, policymakers, scholars, and citizens, the book argues that the regulatory crisis posed by autonomous machine systems is not a future concern but a present reality — and that the law has not yet caught up. Where Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics (1942) were plot devices for fiction, this book offers Seven Laws of Artificial Intelligence as governance instruments: reasoned proposals for debate, refinement, and eventual adoption by jurisdictions worldwide. They are accompanied by the Mali Doctrines, presented as constitutional imperatives for any civilisation that wishes to remain civilised in the age of machine intelligence. The book stands at the intersection of three traditions that rarely speak to each other: legal scholarship, artificial intelligence research, and political philosophy. From law, it draws the doctrines of liability, intent, personhood, and jurisdiction. From AI research, the technical realities of how modern systems learn, optimise, and behave autonomously. From philosophy, the questions about consciousness, power, dignity, and what it means to be human that no purely technical or purely legal analysis can answer on its own. Structure. The work is divided into five parts: (I) philosophical foundations of intelligence, agency, and dignity; (II) the failures of existing legal frameworks — liability, intent, personhood, and jurisdiction — when applied to autonomous systems; (III) the technical realities of how modern AI learns, optimises, and behaves; (IV) the Mali Doctrines, as constitutional imperatives; (V) the Seven Laws of Artificial Intelligence, as reasoned proposals for jurisdictional adoption. Engagement with case law and contemporary developments. The book engages with recent developments including Mata v. Avianca (S.D.N.Y. 2023) on AI hallucinations in legal practice, Thaler v. Comptroller-General of Patents [2023] UKSC 49 on AI inventorship, Loomis v. Wisconsin, 881 N.W.2d 749 (Wis. 2016) on algorithmic risk assessment, the NYT v. OpenAI litigation, the EU AI Act, India's evolving Digital India Act framework, and the regulatory questions arising from generative and agentic AI systems. Intended audience. The book is written as if it might be read by a judge in 2050 ruling on machine personhood, a policymaker facing true artificial general intelligence, or a historian trying to understand why humanity did or did not preserve what mattered most about itself. It is therefore suitable for legal scholars, AI ethics and policy researchers, judges and regulators, graduate and law-school seminars on Law & Technology, and the broader public engaged with the governance of emerging technologies. Open access. Released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. The work may be freely shared, adapted, translated, and used in coursework or commentary, subject to attribution. Translations are actively welcomed; coordination via the project's GitHub repository. Companion repository. Source files, errata, case-law updates, annotations, translations, and companion artefacts are maintained at https://github.com/cybermahaguru/sevenailawsbook.