Carlos Orlando Santana

The agentic web marks a structural transition from a human-centered information network to a digital environment populated by artificial intelligence (AI) agents that perceive, decide, and act autonomously. As delegated action unfolds at machine speed, exceeds discrete moments of human judgment, and distributes decision-making across non-human actors, existing legal frameworks face growing strain, creating an urgent need for new mechanisms capable of sustaining legality in this emerging order. A trustworthy agentic web therefore depends on the infrastructuring of legality through interoperable protocols that organize identity, delegation, and accountability across systems, enabling coherent governance beyond isolated platforms. Towards this end, this article advances a distributed legal infrastructure (DLI), a governance paradigm composed of five interlocking layers: (1) self-sovereign, soulbound agent identities; (2) cognitive AI logic and constraint systems; (3) decentralized adjudication mechanisms for dispute resolution; (4) bottom-up agentic market regulation to mitigate information asymmetries and network effects, including insurance-based models; and (5) portable institutional frameworks that enable legal interoperability while preserving plural sources of authority. This reference framework contributes to emerging research on embedding legality within agentic web infrastructure, aligning distributed technical systems with accountability, contestability, and rule-of-law principles.

The concept of biodiversity, I argue, is poorly suited as an indicator of conservation value. An earlier concept, natural diversity, fits the role better. Natural diversity is broader than biodiversity not only in moving beyond taxonomic categories to encompass other patterns in the tapestry of life, but also in including abiotic, but valuable, aspects of nature. It encompasses, for instance, geological curiosities, natural entities of historical and cultural significance, and parts of nature with unique recreational and aesthetic value. It allows us to capture the idea of a diversity of ecosystem services, many of which are abiotic or have significant abiotic components. I make the case that refocusing conservation science around natural diversity retains many of benefits of using biodiversity as an indicator of value, while avoiding many of biodiversity’s shortcomings. In particular, it provides a framework that highlights the conservation value of many biodiversity “coldspots,” avoids the injustice of making conservation primarily the responsibility of the global south/developing world, and fits more neatly with the legal and ethical frameworks used to make conservation decisions in the public sphere.

Open science is good for both epistemic and social reasons, but in nonobvious ways, it can have detrimental epistemic side effects. Drawing on case studies and the social epistemology of science, I show how practices intended to increase transparency, communication, and information sharing in science can backfire. We should not reject Open Science, just implement it carefully. I argue that we can do so by treating openness as a governing value in science, and thus, that our pursuit of openness needs to be balanced against our pursuit of the whole scheme of values that govern science.

Hypocrisy is generally treated as particularly repugnant, perhaps the “only unforgivable sin.” I argue that this attitude is misplaced. Hypocrisy—especially quotidian hypocrisy by the average citizen—plays an essential role in maintaining and promoting a good society. Hypocrisy facilitates the establishment and maintenance of beneficial social norms, and can secure better social outcomes when full compliance with a norm is suboptimal. The hypocrite then, is sometimes playing a crucial role in society, and in such cases doesn’t deserve the full measure of the reprobation we usually reserve for them. Instead of focusing our reactions on their hypocrisy, we should instead target our attitudes on the misbehavior itself.

Supposedly, stubbornness on the part of scientists—an unwillingness to change one’s position on a scientific issue even in the face of countervailing evidence—helps efficiently divide scientific labor. Maintaining disagreement is important because it keeps scientists pursuing a diversity of leads rather than all working on the most promising, and stubbornness helps preserve this disagreement. Planck’s observation that “Science progresses one funeral at a time” might therefore be an insight into epistemically beneficial stubbornness on the part of researchers. In conversation with extant formal models, recent empirical research, and a novel agent-based model of my own I explore whether the epistemic goods which stubbornness can secure—disagreement and diversity—are attainable through less-costly methods. I make the case that they are, at least in part, and also use my modeling results to show that if stubbornness is scientifically valuable, it still involves a willingness to change one’s mind.