Judge-bot: can AI replace judges?
We live in a period where Artificial Intelligence (AI) takes over many aspects of our life. In some cases, it makes life easier. Nevertheless, it makes us think: will AI takeover our jobs?
Along with the chat-bots which help you buy a new plane ticket or an insurance policy, in the recent months we witnessed introduction of numerous new AI tools which assist you in writing texts, providing financial advice, medical advice and etc.
What about the legal field – one of the most conservative one?
What if we could have a “Judge-Bot” – an AI which can decide if a person violated a law? Would this eliminate corruption? This will certainly eliminate human factor, but maybe not the elements of corruption. One shall not overestimate the power of AI. In essence it is based on a machine learning – what you feed, that will be the basis of the future outcome. In current form of AI that we have now – such model of Judge-bot might not work, because the knowledge basis of such ” judge” will be the past cases, so as a result we may get a perfectly wrong soulless judge, yet not corrupted.
Law has a human element in it. If we eliminate this human element, we may find ourselves in a situation where emotions and sympathy are ruled out. The logical court ruling will then take over.
Machine “reasoning” could be right, but the moral decisions that judges take are not always logical. In civil law jurisdictions, laws are mainly codified. Judges do not heavily rely on case law as much as in common law countries. Such “Judge-Bot” may be more “logical” in its rulings because rules are codified. The AI has to sort out the “right answer.” The situation in the common law jurisdictions would be rather different. We are still far from a situation where AI completely substitutes human judges, but why don’t we rely on AI when deciding on “routine” cases?
If we implement AI in the judicial field, we will have an efficient tool to decide on many cases quickly. This will help eliminate backlogs in the judicial system. At the same time the judiciary system will lack the human element whereby certain aspects of human life may no longer have an influence on a decision of a judge.
Nevertheless, there might be a potential of implementing such “Judge-Bot” in the lower court levels for administrative and civil cases. Think of a traffic rules violation fine or getting a fine for smoking in a prohibited area. It is inevitable that in the near future in a certain shape or a form AI will be implemented in the judiciary system and we have to start from somewhere. The European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ) introduced in 2018 the ‘European Ethical Charter on the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Judicial Systems and their environment‘ and some EU states already started using AI-based tools for daily operations and hence having a ” Judge-bot” might be possible already in the near future. At least the technology will be there, but will we have necessary legal acts to implement this technology?
ApricotLawyer.com