Ask HN: Why don't we automate justice?

[strahil]

Bulgaria recently is shaken with corruption scandals in the judicial system. It made me think where the fault is. Trying to look through different angles, I always seem to end up finding the error in the human act of knowingly breaking the rules.

So why don't we remove the human error factor and simply automate justice as a set of rules, defined by the law makers, executed by developers, with unit tests accompying every law? Lawyers and prosecutors can each present a logical argument on why they think their side should win, (a jury will decide), and an AI will give out the sentence. Should the issue hit an exception, a judge can intercept the case manually.

Am I missing anything? Because this, excluding the politics (unavoidable human factor), sounds too easy.

[whoshallsucceed]

Justice is not a binary thing. For example, given a same crime committed by 2+ different persons, punishment can't be the same because of the personnalities, the reasons that led each one to do what they did.

I've read that for 20 to 30 years, the US tried to make justice somewhat automated by providing some kind of grids the judges had to stick to. They stopped in 2005 because it was really not working.

You should read "Practical Wisdom" for a starter. There is more in this book than justice but everything is worth reading so you won't waste your time :)

[minimaxir]

You may want to watch a few science fiction movies. :p

[orionblastar]

An AI judge won't have any empathy or compassion, no emotions at all. There can be a false positive in the judging process because there is no common sense as well.

You'll end up with a ML program that examines behavior to determine guilt or innocence. You end up with a 24/7 monitoring system with cameras and facial recognition everywhere that looks for certain behavior that might lead to crime based on past behavior of criminals.

You want to end corruption but you replace it with a system that gives you no privacy and spies on you without a warrant. Changes in your behavior could get you arrested on a false positive, like say you have a bad day at work and get stressed out. It detects you are angry about something, and are a danger to yourself or others.

We shouldn't joke about this sort of stuff because one day someone might try to make it happen. After 9/11 there has been a lot of domestic spying by the federal government in the Prism system. https://prism-break.org/en/ other governments have done the same thing. They collect a lot of data on people and try to figure out who is going to do what. But so far they have information overload and can't predict stuff yet. All they need is a better ML program to detect behavior based on past behavior and words.

It kind of is like a sci fi movie with the domestic spying done on the Internet and phones. All they need is a ML program that judges behavior based on the data they collect to arrest people and hold them for trial.

Edit: In the James Bond movie "Specter" they replaced the 00 Program with the Nine Eyes program of drones and cameras monitoring things in 9 different nations that would judge human behavior. The drones would then decide who to kill based on an AI/ML program. The movie established that it was better using human beings to make judgments on matters like that.

[strahil]

Yes, but the submarine was once sci-fi too :)

[minimaxir]

Less on the "impossible" aspect, more on the "really bad things happen when justice is treated as black and white."

And really bad things happen with AI and justice.

[jlg23]

a) You are missing that the human error factor is still present in the automatisation itself. Only you don't send one person to prison by mistake for an offense, but maybe a lot of people for a class of offenses. "Ooops, off-by-one error in Judge 1.1, 5 innocent people executed. Patch forthcoming."

b) One cannot encode laws in programs; a judge's task is to interpret the meaning of the words and apply them to a case. This is rarely done in local courts (which mostly really just follow a schema), but higher courts, at least in functional democracies, do actually look at the circumstances under which a law was created.

[bobby_9x]

Computers and algorithms have no compassion. It would be very difficult to send someone to prision based on justice bot 2.0.

It's bad enough when companies like Amazon use bots to do their dirty work to ban marketplace sellers.

[jacalata]

Try reading about mandatory sentencing, which was basically an effort to remove discretion from judges and these days is considered a giant failure.