Imagine you walk into a courtroom, and you are greeted by your lawyer who extends a mechanical hydraulic hand encased in resin composite to greet you. This is the age of bionic law. Your lawyer is a robot, programmed with billions of parameters with caselaw, federal and local law and statutes going back 100 of years.
Your defence strategy did not require a team of highly paid lawyers. It was a matter of seconds to come up with the perfect strategy to find a way through the prosecution’s case and allow you to walk, Scott free. Your robot lawyer has analysed every possible permutation, every line of attack that the prosecution can direct, and has an answer to everything. You could even shoot someone and walk, as Donald Trump once claimed.
Absurd scenario? Some futuristic dystopia in the sci-fi realm? No, it’s here already in embryonic form. The Website DoNotPay has robot lawyers that will challenge parking tickets and instigate low-level defence strategies for common penalties. Joshua Browden the founder was a Harvard graduate who realised that all those parking tickets he was getting could be automatically challenged rather than spending time filling out forms. And so he started his app which, from humble start-up, has now received a 210 million dollars cash injection from venture capitalists who clearly think he’s onto something.
In fact, there will be a court case held soon in which the lawyer will be instructed by earpieces connected remotely to a robot who will defend a case. Currently, the Robot Lawyer is just a chatbot on a smartphone, and it is still a long way before a robot will actually plead your case on behalf of you, but the direction of travel is clear. The Chatbot lawyer will evolve to make justice a universal right, and not just the privilege of the wealthy who can afford the best legal counsel that money can buy.
AI is already used in the legal world, and is involved in case research, discovery, and scheduling. AI programs research cases with multiple keywords, back office stuff. But will robots be able to replace humans in live scenarios?
Lawyers are hired for their ability to argue, persuade, and find the best arguments to support their clients. With current technology, a computer is unable to nuance an argument to a judge or jury, let alone convey a sense of justice or human reality.
And essential aspect in presenting a case is the ability to persuade. And that very much depends on the tone of voice and diction, presenting a sympathetic tone. But with advances in Artificial Software such as Amazon Polly and IBM Watson, AI voices are becoming increasingly human, realistically speaking words in a natural human flow of syntax and semantics. Research has shown that when a robot speaks in a naturalistic voice, people are much more prepared to accept the machine’s humanity. They can overcome their resistance to the humanoid appearance.
Law has become increasingly part of the entertainment industry. High-profile cases such as the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial had hundreds of millions of viewers on YouTube with dedicated channels monetised to benefit from the ad campaigns that ran on the back of the televised trial. Was Amber Heard guilty of libel? Certainly Johnny Depp‘s lawyers won the case in the court of public opinion. How would a lawyer with robotic programming win over a jury in such a case? How would a ‘Droid fare against Camilla Vasquez with her youth, flowing hair, white suits and tender exchanges with Johnny?
it’s really down to the fundamental question: is a robot sentient? With a programmed dataset of hundreds of millions of parameters, a robot will be able to predict what words, what phrases and what arguments would best appeal to a jury. They will be able to access a juror’s back history from their web history and analyse their facial expressions, even their chemical responses, then craft multi-layered defence arguments directed towards each individual juror, sending out subliminal messages. Lawyers do this already but a robot could do it better.
When society transforms law into entertainment for the masses and access to justice is measured by wealth, the introduction of programmed humanoids will restore the underlying principle of any legal system, and reaffirm that the law is a due process of justice, not a TikTok video.
