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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

The AI is not a person in the sense that a person is a person. You see, when a person makes a judgement, you judge the judgement based on personal qualities: did they look like they were paying attention during the case, did they say things that were well reasoned, do they have the right experience?

If we put an AI in the role of the judge/attorneys, we will come up against "ah but the robot didn't do this thing that a human would do" and a lot of people would be convinced that the result was illegitimate. Not necessarily wrong, but without the legitimacy conferred by being done by a human being.

It would require our social system to turn over some decisions that have been done by a very protected sector of society (legal people) to newbies coming from the tech world. "This is the correct sentence because random forest says so" is going to ring hollow to a lot of people.

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Ah, but if we take the lessons of the Shitty Technology Adoption Curve, we just need to start by applying it against^Wwith people "you can abuse with impunity (prisoners, kids, migrants, etc) and then work their way up the privilege gradient."

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/

So, we start by using AI to help decide immigration claims or parole reviews, which frees up real lawyers to deal with the terrible backlog of more important cases. And once it's in place there, and the results have stood long enough without complaints (from anyone who matters) that society has effectively legitimised them, we can start using the AIs to start "helping" more with other cases.

...now I have to go shower.

Maybe good to realize that judge/jury system is not how it's done everywhere. For example, here in the Netherlands, there are just lawyers and a judge. There is much less emotional swaying of peers (for better or for worse) the focus is on objectivity according to the law.

No saying it's better or worse, but maybe more suited to AI assistants?

That said, I'm sure ChatGPT can make emotional appeals.

I quite like jury trials personally, they're a good mechanism as an authentic people's check on officialdom in my opinion. A similar concept could also serve as a good check on AI by humans I think!

Already exists in those systems, there's "lay judges" who sit with the judge and have stuff explained to them.

IMO the 12 jurors thing is not ideal. Too many people, and cases can get technical.

One major flaw in jurist system is the deliberation phase where jurists argue with each other and sometimes bully / browbeat / shame one another into voting a certain way. If jurors could simply vote after hearing the case with no group dynamics, it would be more objective.

Sure, but until computers get citizenship (and maybe even then), it will be illegal to use non-algorithmic programs for decision-making, because it runs afoul of the laws that mandate that you must be able to explain how the program helped you to came to a decision (tracing the algorithm step by step) in language that your average person can understand.

Maybe the program could detail its decision process if it is sufficiently advanced

"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision". Or in this case, a legal one.

https://twitter.com/swiftonsecurity/status/13855657371677245...

The accountability of the existing judicial system is already pretty thin, and in some cases being elected makes it worse rather than better, but turning it over to automation? Having a system that is entirely unaware of the society and political environment in which it operates? That is very bad for legitimacy. Now, you don't need legitimacy so long as the monopoly on violence holds ...

They said in ~100 years. Think back 100 years ago and how different society was. The war to end all wars recently ended.

On legitimacy just because a human did it, I think you are right, and I think the rate of appeal for judgements done by an AI would be higher than judgements done by humans, but if you can even have a 10% "AI-only" close rate for cases, how much time and money are you going to save that can be invested in better justice for the "human required" cases? Over time though, 150, 200, 250 years from now, there's no other way around it, I think.

Well I'm on the tech side so I agree with you, but it's a massive social change. To people who don't understand tech it's like introducing magic, something they clearly are going to fight against.

But yeah there must be low hanging fruit there that in theory could be picked.

Or maybe get that judge who codes to help educate some of his colleagues.

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