{"id":2042,"date":"2017-11-07T12:43:52","date_gmt":"2017-11-07T20:43:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/erikdolson.com\/?p=2042"},"modified":"2017-11-07T12:43:52","modified_gmt":"2017-11-07T20:43:52","slug":"lawyer-bots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/erikdolson.com\/?p=2042","title":{"rendered":"Lawyer bots"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/b>A friend, a lawyer and a judge, sent a link<\/a> about a company in San Francisco trying to replace lawyers with robots. A professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology said artificial intelligence couldn\u2019t tackle more than 10 percent of legal issues with today\u2019s technology.<\/span><\/p>\n

I wrote back saying that I didn\u2019t think the law would be that difficult, since law was encoded in words with rules applied that resulted in patterns of outcome. I envisioned case studies and decisions, the history of law in the U.S. going back to the Constitution, being fed to the machines which would learn it in about five minutes.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201d\u2026 it is just a bit more complicated than that!\u201d the Judge replied.<\/span><\/p>\n

He pointed out that judges and lawyers often bring more than case law and rules to their arguments. They think about how a decision might affect society, bring inputs from their lives that are not part of any legal history.<\/span><\/p>\n

To my statement about law just being language, he pointed out that language is not always clear. When teaching, he used to show pictures of a stump. a stool, a kitchen chair, a toilet, and a throne. Which was \u201cchair?\u201d he would ask his students. Where did \u201cchairness\u201d begin?<\/span><\/p>\n

One of my favorite arguments also involved \u201cchairs.\u201d Is it a kitchen chair, or is it \u201clegs, seat, and back,\u201d or is it \u201csteel, wood and plastic,\u201d or is it \u201ccarbon, iron-nickel, and heterochain polymers?\u201d The answer is, yes.<\/span><\/p>\n

So the simplicity of \u201cchair\u201d quickly becomes more complicated. To say that \u201cThe Law\u201d is just words and rules was an oversimplification.<\/span><\/p>\n

And yet\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

An article<\/span><\/a> in Quanta Magazine<\/i> covers research at University of California Berkeley to give AI \u201ccuriosity,\u201d or a \u201creward which the agent generates internally on its own, so that it can go explore more about its world,\u201d according to one of the researchers.<\/span><\/p>\n

One problem was that the AI could get \u201cstuck\u201d in an environment that offers too much stimulation. So researchers engineered their AI to \u201ctranslate its visual input from raw pixels into an abstracted version of reality. This abstraction incorporates only features of the environment that have the potential to affect the agent\u2026\u201d wrote author John Pavlus.<\/span><\/p>\n

I suggest that human intelligence does the same thing and among our primary mechanisms of abstraction, or filters, are\u2026 words. Words describe not just what \u201cis,\u201d but \u201cwhat is not.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

When we teach infants to speak, we teach words, but also contexts and associations. The wiring of the brain forms patterns that associate the feeling of hunger with the word \u201cbreakfast.\u201d We associate furry with dog. Some patterns are reenforced, others wither. The word \u201cdog\u201d is not associated with pancakes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Repetition of words create \u201cfields of context.\u201d Listeners bring unstated contexts, conscious and subconscious, to conversations about things even as simple as \u201cchairs.\u201d This unstated understanding between speaker and listener allows one to understand what is meant by \u201cchair\u201d in different conversations without elaboration. <\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s also a source of friction, when the context brought by listener is not the same as that of speaker, such as when discussing \u201clove.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As we extend the reach of AI\u2019s by giving them \u201ccuriosity,\u201d and perhaps someday \u201clove\u201d and \u201clust\u201d and \u201cfear\u201d and \u201canger,\u201d along with tools to seek and avoid, these entities will need to abstract their environment with ever more effectiveness. Some of the filters\u00a0 <\/span>will be words, which will reference \u201cthings\u201d or patterns or contexts and allow them to read and understand the entire history of law by comparing inputs to outcomes.<\/span><\/p>\n

The judge points out there may be difficulty with irony, and I admit there is one arena that may elude Artificial Intelligence longer than others. This was illustrated by the philosopher Marx in the last century, when he said, \u201cTime flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

According to Dolson\u2019s Theory of Comedy, all humor is based on something being \u201cout of context,\u201d and humor is our way of communicating to each other similarities in intelligence. But patterns of brain activity are becoming ever more accessible to scientists who may soon be able to \u201csee\u201d brains work and predict<\/span><\/a> thinking. In other words, read minds: Will they see the joke?<\/span><\/p>\n

While the law may be accessible to machines in the not-to-distant future, we\u2019ll know machines really \u201cthink\u201d when they\u2019ve learned to laugh. <\/span><\/p>\n

* (Groucho Marx, 1965?)<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<\/b>A friend, a lawyer and a judge, sent a link<\/a> about a company in San Francisco trying to replace lawyers with robots. A professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology said artificial intelligence couldn\u2019t tackle more than 10 percent of legal issues with today\u2019s technology.<\/p>\n

I wrote back saying that I didn\u2019t think the law would be that difficult, since law was encoded in words with rules applied that resulted in patterns of outcome. I envisioned case studies and decisions, the history of law in the U.S. going back to the Constitution, being fed to the machines which \u2026 Read more\u2026 → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[419,361,315,422,423,420,141,231,421],"class_list":["post-2042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-out-my-window","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-humor","tag-intelligence","tag-machine","tag-minds","tag-philosophy","tag-robots","tag-thought"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3mcOb-wW","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/erikdolson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/erikdolson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/erikdolson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erikdolson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erikdolson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2042"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/erikdolson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2043,"href":"https:\/\/erikdolson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2042\/revisions\/2043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/erikdolson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erikdolson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erikdolson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}