[jorisw]

Nilay Patel argues that law is undeterministic (and its application ambiguous) to begin with:

> But law isn’t actually code, and society and courts aren’t computers. [...] the law is not deterministic. You simply cannot take the facts of a case, the law as written, and predict the outcome of that case with any real certainty, even though the formality of the legal system makes people think it works like a computer — that it’s predictable.

> [...] it’s actually ambiguity that’s at the very heart of our legal system. It’s ambiguity that makes lawyers lawyers. Honestly, it’s ambiguity that makes people hate lawyers because it’s always possible to argue the other side, and it’s always possible to find the gray area in the law. That’s why prosecutors end up working as defense attorneys and why our regulators tend to end up working for big corporations.

https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba...

IMO, as with most domains, AI _tools_ will save a huge amount of time, but it's the human specialist making judgment calls based on real world context.

[mirsadm]

You can apply this same argument to everything. Code is deterministic but what is being made is often not because people don't know what they want to make. Society can choose just to make everything boring and deterministic so that computers can do everything.

[CobrastanJorji]

I agree that you can apply this same argument to everything. And it's still a correct argument.

Programmers will have jobs for a long time, and our most valuable skill will be figuring out what the heck management wants us to make.

[rayiner]

It’s not just that law is ambiguous. That’s something that can be worked around. It’s that lawyering deals with human disputes and everything that comes with that. Imagine asking a couple that’s getting divorced “why are you getting divorced?” You’ll get two completely different stories with different recollections of the facts. Business disputes aren’t really any different. People have selective recollection, they don’t remember things, they shade the truth or hide things or just lie.

Oftentimes, the law is reasonably clear. The hard part is getting the facts out of the witnesses to figure out what really happened, so you have facts to apply to the law.

[crimsoneer]

This isn't really true though. This is how the law used to work, until people did the research and discovered it let to absolutely loads of mad variation in outcomes, with people with similar offences getting totally different sentences based on random luck. Hence most countries not have pretty strict sentencing guidelines, with a bit of space for judgement on top (despite a lot of protesting from judges).

https://www.ubs.com/global/en/our-firm/what-we-do/our-brand/...

You should be able to predict the outcome of a court case if you have all the facts available. That's what fairness means.

[fontain]

“most countries now have pretty strict sentencing guidelines”

That’s a vast, vast overstatement.

“You should be able to predict the outcome of a court case if you have all the facts available. That's what fairness means.”

Too much of a simplification. The role of a jury is to interpret the evidence, every jury is unique. Evidence is not an absolute, there are no “facts”. A judge can include/exclude evidence that would sway a jury one way or the other. Sentencing, even without guidelines, is the least variable part of the criminal justice system in the western world.

[crimsoneer]

Fair, most countries that follow the common law judicial system I should have said.

[AndrewDucker]

Non-grey-area cases are common, and never reach court.

If a case reaches court then that means that either the evidence or the law isn't clear enough for the person to simply plead guilty (or the case to be dropped).

[alistairSH]

Something like 90% of both criminal and business cases in the US never get to trial - the rules are deterministic enough the vast majority of the time to avoid trial. The stuff we hear about on TV are the edge cases.

[amanaplanacanal]

Our sense of what is fair evolved over millions of years, and is not internally consistent. How could the law ever be completely fair?

[jjav]

> Nilay Patel argues that law is undeterministic (and its application ambiguous)

I argue that of all things, law should be as deterministic as possible.

I've always thought that we (as a country) should maintain one single ordered list of specific crimes and punishments. Every new case that wants to set a punishment must insert it into this ordered list and explain convincingly why it fits into the list at the proposed position.

This would prevent the outrageous differences we see today where someone gets a few days of house arrest for murder and another guy gets a decade of solitary confinment for stealing a pen.

[codeduck]

> I argue that of all things, law should be as deterministic as possible.

It is (probably) impossible to write down a complete list of rules for how to judge even petty crimes. Someone who steals a loaf of bread because their child is starving should not be punished the same way as someone who steals a loaf of bread because they're a kleptomaniac.

No two situations are identical, and the problems start when you try to come up with a one-size-fits-all approach.

A human with sound judgement (and, arguably, some empathy) should be in control.

[readthenotes1]

You can divorce sentencing from understanding what legalities apply to determining guilt.

You can also deterministically ask what characteristics or traits have been considered when applying sentencing and give the precedence for that.

[z3t4]

Someone with psychopathic characteristics would lie in their favour. So someone would need to fact check, a doctor would have to check if the children are actually starving? And on the other side, someone who contribute greatly to community and society, should that person get a lower sentence because of that?

[wisty]

Counter argument - even stone age Chat GPT 3 was great at making reasonably convincing sounding arguments and newer models are great at aligning those arguments to souces (laws or cases). Chat is IMO better at ambiguous nonsense than objective analysis.

[probably_wrong]

You may want to take a look at the "AI hallucination Cases" database which tracks cases when someone used AI and ended up presenting made-up sources in a legal case.

https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/

Just because GPT can make an argument sound convincing it doesn't mean that the argument is convincing. Or based on objective truth, even.