HUMAN MACHINE NEGOTIATION, COMPUTATIONAL CONSENT AND ALGORITHMIC OPACITY IN CONTEMPORARY CONTRACT LAW

Abstract The progressive integration of artificial intelligence into contemporary economic processes is generating a struct generate new forms of epistemic asymmetry between individuals and digital platforms, thereby redefining the relationship between private autonomy, transparency, contractual freedom and algorithmic accountability. The analysis concludes by emphasising the necessity of a neo-constitutional reconstruction of digital consent grounded upon the protection of cognitive self-determination in the age of behavioural prediction. ural transformation of the general theory of contract and, more profoundly, of the modern conception of contractual consent itself. The contemporary digital ecosystem is characterised by the emergence of human–machine interaction models in which legally relevant decision-making no longer derives exclusively from the conscious manifestation of individual will, but from the continuous interaction between human subjects, computational architectures, predictive systems and opaque algorithmic infrastructures. This article critically analyses such transformation through an interdisciplinary and comparative methodology integrating European private law, general contract theory, behavioural law and economics, philosophy of language, information theory and the European regulation of artificial intelligence. Particular attention is devoted to the crisis of contractual intelligibility within digital environments, to the distinction between explainable language and non-interpretable language in machine learning systems, and to the progressive erosion of the traditional voluntarist conception of consent. The article demonstrates how automated decisionmaking and the increasing diffusion of non-transparent neural models