ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RENDERS VERDICTS

A consideration of the many ways artificial intelligence can contribute to the judicial process, including the possibility of rendering verdicts.

Author Shamov, both a computer programmer and a skills-development trainer for lawyers, writes about the proliferation of AI in the legal world. AI is already widely adopted for various kinds of textual analysis, and traditional research methods have ceded ground to AI analysis of massive tranches of data. As the technology predictably continues to increase its power and sophistication, the argument for its even more pervasive adoption is clear—it will surely save money and time as routine tasks are automated, case backlogs are dramatically reduced, and access to legal information is made easily accessible. More thorny, however, is the question of whether we’ll see an advanced “judicial AI” that makes more complex decisions, even including the issuance of verdicts. This notion of a “‘human factor’-free justice system” would require more, the author intelligently avers, than just a leap in computing power, but also the mimicking of the human elements of judicial reasoning, which include empathy, intuition, and an ability to appraise moral consequences. In this brief, impressively incisive study, Shamov furnishes an illuminating synopsis of the issues, moral and technological, at stake. Also, he prudently acknowledges that the current state of AI would not permit such a transition, given the absence of a “comprehensive manual for humans.” Still, he never adequately defends his optimism that AI will surely be able to mimic human cognition completely as the result of the “machine modeling of emotions,” let alone that it will “be capable of empathetic interaction with a person.” In these cases, his enthusiasm for AI’s future prospects overwhelms his own analytical rigor, which somewhat diminishes this book’s contributions to an important and necessary discussion.

An often unsubstantiated exuberance undermines this otherwise thoughtful, informed study.