  An important part of law and regulation is demanding explanations for actual
and potential failures. We ask questions like: What happened (or might happen)
to cause this failure? And why did (or might) it happen? These are disguised
normative questions - they really ask what ought to have happened, and how the
humans involved ought to have behaved. To answer the normative questions, law
and regulation seeks a narrative explanation, a story. At present, we seek
these kinds of narrative explanation from AI technology, because as humans we
seek to understand technology's working through constructing a story to explain
it. Our cultural history makes this inevitable - authors like Asimov, writing
narratives about future AI technologies like intelligent robots, have told us
that they act in ways explainable by the narrative logic which we use to
explain human actions and so they can also be explained to us in those terms.
This is, at least currently, not true. This work argues that we can only solve
this problem by working from both sides. Technologists will need to find ways
to tell us stories which law and regulation can use. But law and regulation
will also need to accept different kinds of narratives, which tell stories
about fundamental legal and regulatory concepts like fairness and
reasonableness that are different from those we are used to.
