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In the future, lawyers have been replaced with AIs. In 2016 their jobs are safe because they have specialized knowledge and can act creatively. Eventually, those will be traits that robots can also have, with the added bonus of not needing to be trained and having the appearance of impartiality (which is probably more important than actual impartiality).
Are judges also robots? I haven’t decided. A robot, you can go through their code and track down the logic of their reasoning. Maybe in this society, the people in charge are just as happy to keep the reasons for the decisions courts make untraceable as long as they get the “right” results.
↓ Transcript
Panel 1: Simon, while walking home: "AHHR." Bird: "This will not look good on your next case review, Simon. Expect furvver curfew restrictions. You may choose to have your priest or your lawyerbot present, as usual."
Panel 2: The girls gather around Maida. Zaynab: "are you alright?" Maria: "Are you sure you just tripped? He didn't hit you or noffing?" Maida: "Ugh. Sorry."
Panel 3: Maida: "I just blacked out for a minute. This is so embarrassing. I haven't done any serious running since..."
Panel 4: Maida, standing up again: "It doesn't matter. It's not your problem."
Panel 5: Maida feels dizzy and sits back down. Zaynab: "Ah!" Maida: "Woah. Dizzy still. Sitting down again." Maria: "What's wrong? Are you ill?"
Panel 6: Maida: "Oi. It's a long story. You sure you want to hear this?" Zaynab: "Of course!"
Panel 2: The girls gather around Maida. Zaynab: "are you alright?" Maria: "Are you sure you just tripped? He didn't hit you or noffing?" Maida: "Ugh. Sorry."
Panel 3: Maida: "I just blacked out for a minute. This is so embarrassing. I haven't done any serious running since..."
Panel 4: Maida, standing up again: "It doesn't matter. It's not your problem."
Panel 5: Maida feels dizzy and sits back down. Zaynab: "Ah!" Maida: "Woah. Dizzy still. Sitting down again." Maria: "What's wrong? Are you ill?"
Panel 6: Maida: "Oi. It's a long story. You sure you want to hear this?" Zaynab: "Of course!"
Sorry, JD. Gonna drop my unrequested two cents into your world-building, here (as opposed to making some snarky and self-amusing remark). I would think that a society like the one you are painting (an elitist republic with theocratic overtones) would almost have to use AI judges, if only to apply the correct religious law to the defendant. The subtle differences between Mosaic, Christian, and Shari’a Law are dizzying enough without adding in the complete variation afforded by Vedic Law, Confucian and Shinto Philosophy, and other, lesser religious codes. No human judge would be able to retain and apply the necessary codes properly.
Hm. Maybe. We’re not actually going to ever see a judge in this story, so that means I get to play Schrodinger’s Judiciary and not ever decide, finally, whether that role is played by human beings or AIs or… the third option… that… is a spoiler for later.
Just asking god directly? Why bother with all the fiddly intermediaries, amiright?
“A robot, you can go through their code and track down the logic of their reasoning.” Maybe that’ll be true in 500 years, but it’s an open research question today! See, for example, the Future of Life Institute’s document on AI research priorities: https://futureoflife.org/ai-open-letter/
The current most popular machine learning techniques (such as neural nets or “deep learning”), for example, make decisions that are difficult or impossible to explain, even for an expert. Even software where all the rules were explicitly programmed by a human will show behavior that was unexpected and undesirable: that’s called “bugs”. 🙂 Debugging software—that is, explaining why it did what it did and how to keep it from doing that again—is substantially harder than writing it in the first place.
And yet we’re already trying to apply these machine learning techniques to parts of a judge’s job: various places have considered sentencing based on statistical predictions of the likelihood of re-offending. (See https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/prison-reform-risk-assessment/ for instance.) Even if you believe that’s a good idea (and personally, I’m undecided), I’m pretty nervous about doing it at a time when nothing else in computing works right.
With all that said, I’m betting judges are robots in this story, because it’s a terrible idea so of course that’s what humanity will do. 😓