Observing China’s use of force, its voting behaviours and argumentation in the UN Security Council (UNSC) and its official statements on other relevant occasions allows summing up the Chinese approach to jus ad bellum in the following aspects: a narrow meaning of the term ‘force’, a positivist interpretation of the threshold, time and target requirements of exercising the right of self-defence, a negative attitude towards humanitarian intervention and a strict reading of the responsibility to protect. These positivist tools have led China to consistently endorse a ‘restrictivist’ understanding of the UN Charter that prohibits any use of military force by one state against another absent authorization from the UNSC or a situation involving self-defence. In this sense, China would likely maintain its ‘wait and see’ approach regarding jus ad bellum in cyberspace. However, faced with the anonymity of cyberspace and the increasing frequency of cyber-attacks, the possibility that China will adopt a more flexible understanding of certain rules cannot be ruled out.

Over the coming decades, artificial intelligence and robotics will continue to grow rapidly in power and scope, exerting a transformative impact on our lives. Seven trends are likely: the machines will become progressively more versatile and multifunctional in their capabilities; they will be designed to improve their own software and hardware over time, as they interact with their environment; the line between AI and robots will gradually blur, as machines come to permeate our society at all levels; these machines will be entrusted with complex practical tasks that require them to develop sophisticated commonsense knowledge about the human social world; the machines will be interconnected in functional networks that multiply their powers; such machines will need to be able to refuse to obey certain kinds of human commands, raising fundamental questions about who controls their actions; and the logic of arms races will apply to such machines, impelling nations and corporations to develop increasingly powerful machines as quickly as possible, with only a secondary concern for caution and safety.

One of the more challenging intersections of law and technology is the use of computers and associated systems to commit criminal offences. While terminology varies, the neologism cybercrime is widely used to refer to a range of offending that involves computers as targets (eg hacking); as instruments (eg online fraud and forgery); or as incidental to the commission of a crime (eg using the internet to plan or organise a more conventional crime).1 As noted in Chapter 2, some cybercrimes are essentially the same as their ‘terrestrial’ counterparts, but adopt modern technology for their commission (ie ‘old wine in new bottles’), while others represent significantly newer forms of criminality. Examples of the former might include cyberstalking and online fraud, where the message is much the same but the means of communication is more efficient; while the latter might include distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against websites.