(2º Post) Between the Sea and the Machine: Reflections on Professor Vasco Pereira da Silva’s “How to Prevent Submersion”

Between the Sea and the Machine: Reflections on Professor Vasco Pereira da Silva’s “How to Prevent Submersion”

by Guilherme Rijo Filipe number 140119170

“Law, like the State, must learn how to swim — or it will drown.”
— Vasco Pereira da Silva, AI, Constitutional and Administrative Law: How to Prevent Submersion (Bologna, 2024)

 

The Metaphor of Submersion

In How to Prevent Submersion, Professor Vasco Pereira da Silva develops a powerful metaphor to capture the contemporary condition of public law in the digital age.
Submersion denotes not merely the invasion of new technologies into legal life, but the progressive drowning of juridical rationality under the flood of algorithmic logic and technocratic governance.

For Professor Vasco Pereira da Silva, the question is existential: will the constitutional and administrative State preserve its normative capacity to guide technological development, or will it sink beneath the waves of automation?
The metaphor evokes the image of a legal order losing breath — suffocating beneath data, speed, and efficiency. The challenge, therefore, is not to resist technological transformation, but to learn to breathe within it, ensuring that law remains a human act of meaning and judgment.

The Constitutional Dimension: Law as a Rational Practice

Professor Vasco Pereira da Silva’s argument rests on a profoundly constitutional conception of law.
Drawing on Lon Fuller and Ronald Dworkin, he reminds us that law is not a mere instrument of regulation, but a moral enterprise, an interpretive practice grounded in the internal morality of legality and the pursuit of justice.
In this sense, the constitutional framework functions as the “immune system” of the legal order — protecting it from technocratic infection by reaffirming the human values at its core.

Artificial intelligence, however, tends to replace deliberative rationality with computational rationality.
Decisions once justified by reasons are now executed by data-driven correlations.
Professor Vasco Pereira da Silva therefore warns of the emergence of an algorithmic State that threatens the classic ideals of legality, separation of powers, and accountability.

The antidote to submersion lies in what he calls a “reconstitutionalisation of technology” — re-anchoring technological systems within the logic of fundamental rights and democratic legitimacy.
Here the influence of Habermas’s discourse theory is explicit: law must remain the medium through which technical power is translated into legitimate authority.

The Administrative Dimension: From Bureaucracy to Algorithmic Governance

At the administrative level, the metaphor of submersion becomes practical.
Administrative law has long been associated with the rationalisation of public decision-making — a form of “bureaucratic reason”.
Yet, as Professor Vasco Pereira da Silva notes, the rise of algorithmic systems introduces a new stage of rationalisation, one that risks displacing human prudence (phronesis) with statistical automation.

The principles of legality, transparency, and good administration must therefore be reinterpreted in the age of algorithms.
The duty to give reasons, for example, now entails a duty of explicability: public authorities cannot rely on opaque technological systems whose operations are immune to judicial scrutiny.
Otherwise, the administrative State ceases to be a Rechtsstaat and becomes a data-state.

Professor Vasco Pereira da Silva’s appeal is ultimately to restore the prudential character of administrative judgment — a form of ratio cum prudentia, capable of integrating technological tools without surrendering to them.
In his own terms, the aim is to preserve the “human face of administration” in an age increasingly tempted by post-human efficiency.

 Law as Narrative: Reclaiming Meaning in a Post-Human Order

In one of the most striking parts of the paper, Professor Vasco Pereira da Silva invokes Paul Ricoeur and Hannah Arendt to defend law as a narrative and dialogical practice.
Against the reduction of law to mere algorithmic calculation, he proposes a return to interpretation — to law as a form of storytelling that gives coherence and moral orientation to human coexistence.

Submersion, then, is not simply the loss of institutional control; it is the loss of narrative meaning in public life.
The preventive strategy, as the author suggests, lies in the hermeneutic renewal of law: re-understanding it as an ethical, discursive, and creative act that constantly translates constitutional values into the technological language of our time.

Conclusion: Preventing Submersion

The risk of submersion is real, but not inevitable.
For Professor Vasco Pereira da Silva, the solution is neither naive technophobia nor blind technocracy. It is a constitutional and administrative vigilance capable of adapting to technological transformation without losing its human centre.

The Constitution remains the oxygen of law, and Administrative Law the art of breathing within the State.
If the digital sea continues to rise, the jurist must become both swimmer and navigator — capable of living with technology, yet never allowing it to dictate the current.

“Technology is the sea; Law must be the lighthouse.”
— Vasco Pereira da Silva

Guilherme Rijo Filipe 

140119170 

Bibliography: 

VASCO PEREIRA DA SILVA, AI, Constitutional and Administrative Law: How to Prevent Submersion, Bologna, 2024.