Hello, it's Fortune tech editor Alexei Oreskovic filling in for Jeremy this week.
They say the lawyer who represents himself in court has a fool for a client. But what to make of the person who represents himself with an A.I. lawyer?
In 2023, that curious question is not a mere hypothetical. On Monday, a company called DoNotPay said that it will use an artificial intelligence bot to argue a case in traffic court. The company’s founder Joshua Browder told Politico that a defendant would surreptitiously wear an earpiece in court, feeding the discourse and proceedings to a remote A.I. bot. The A.I. attorney’s responses will then be piped into the ear of the defendant, who will parrot the legal arguments as if they were their own.
No doubt, Browder’s courtroom caper is more self-serving stunt than legal game-changer. But it got me thinking about the role that A.I. might one day play in the legal system. And while the notion of A.I. advocates is fun to imagine, the more consequential role for A.I. technology might be with adjudicators—the judges and juries who decide things.
It sounds dystopian (and given the many biases and flaws that we know plague A.I. today, it should). But it’s not outlandish. After all, A.I. algorithms already serve as judges in a lot of aspects of our lives—they decide what content you see, and don’t see, in your social media feed; what route you take when you put directions in a mapping app; and whether it’s your face or another’s when you try to unlock your smartphone. Some insurance companies now use A.I. to make an initial determination about whether a claim is legitimate or fraudulent.
So why not legal cases?
Imagine if a jury was composed of 12 bots, each trained and calibrated to have a different blend of distinct values and views. One algorithmic trait might favor classic liberal social values, another might favor gun ownership rights, and another might lean libertarian. Some algorithms might favor punishment, while others favor rehabilitation.
To prevent canny lawyers from gaming the system the way an SEO expert games Google’s search algorithm, the values would have to be scrambled and assigned to the 12 juror bots before each case, with thousands, or millions, of possible permutations.
Or consider the nation’s highest court.
The biggest criticism of the Supreme Court’s justices these days is how human they are, allowing their petty personal politics, prejudices, and grievances to seep into their jurisprudence. A bench of A.I. justices could replace such fallible egos with the dispassionate logic of the machine.
This is all super fanciful of course, and unlikely to occur anytime soon, if ever. More realistic is A.I.’s gradual expansion to take on more decisions in other realms of our lives, from loan-making to medical treatment. It’s not as high-profile as an A.I. Supreme Court, but probably no less deserving of our awareness and discussion.
With that, here’s the rest of this week’s A.I. news.
Alexei Oreskovic
@lexnfx
alexei.oreskovic@fortune.com
