Sir, – Reports from a talk at the Bar Council about the likely impact of artificial intelligence on the legal profession reminded me of the line from Alexander Graham Bell predicting that “one day every major city in America will have a telephone” (“The AI shake-up of the legal profession”, News, November 4th).
It is hard to think in ways sufficiently different to reflect or encompass truly “game changing” innovation. The experts largely seem to envisage a role for technology in writing documents of low complexity in place of junior trainees all the while asking “Do you want a computer to defend you?” The implicit assumption is that the system will be essentially the same, but with technology assisting in the preparatory process.
Looking at other professions –medicine, especially radiology, pathology and surgery say, or architecture and accountancy – it seems likely that existing systems and practitioners can quite credibly and foreseeably be replaced by AI-operated robots. One would imagine that an AI device, free of human biases, could similarly obviate the entire need to generate legal documents, to have hearings and conduct cases.
In general the burdens of proof – be it the balance of probability or beyond reasonable doubt – are ultimately determined by the opinions of people, jurors or judges, to have been met after listening to material presented to them. An AI system could surely look at all the information and calculate the actual relevant probability and simply decide the case. Asking two bots to prepare separate cases for humans to then present to other humans would seem a very limited application of the technology.
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The real challenge AI presents us as humans may be maintaining our relevance and our roles and in justifying them. – Yours, etc,
BRIAN O’BRIEN,
Kinsale,
Co Cork.