Sir, – Brian O’Brien (Letters, November 7th) in his call for AI systems to decide legal cases, states that “An AI system could surely look at all the information and calculate the actual relevant probability and simply decide the case.”
Take a “simple” murder case. Among the facts are the state of mind of the accused, the behaviour and life experiences of all involved in the events before the crime and the level of remorse and attempts at atonement.
The algorithm of the AI computer would need to incorporate many similar pieces of information in its final judgment. AI machines do not have opinions (at least so far), so it would necessarily need to invoke the precedent and decisions of past cases, all of which have been determined using the opinions, emotions and biases that contribute to human judgment.
For a fair trial based on probability, the information involved would pass through several AI machines, each running a slightly different precedent-based algorithm.
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So, in effect, we would have simply replaced a jury of 12 humans, with all of their opinions and emotions, with 12 AI machines making judgments completely based around a different set of human opinions and emotions. – Yours, etc,
SEAN McGIBBON,
Kilkenny.
