Posts Tagged: "AI"

As anyone who’s worked at a law firm can attest, lawyers at a firm use each others’ experience to inform their strategy in a given case. Firm-wide emails asking if anyone has appeared in front of a particular judge or tribunal are routine and allow lawyers to benefit from the insights their colleagues provide. Big data analytics allow lawyers to gather this same information, but on a much larger scale. For instance, analytics platforms allow attorneys to view their judge’s complete history, including every decision issued and every case cited, to identify the legal precedent the judge finds most persuasive.

The law waits for no one and neither does AI, which has already made a lasting impact in many areas of business, including the practice of law. Contracts, e-discovery and overall legal research have all changed thanks to AI, but as computers driven by ever-increasing processing power exhibit extraordinarily intelligent behavior we can only assume such advances are far from over. Whether within the enterprise, partners, customers, opposing litigants or elsewhere, legal assets cannot hide from the likes of Watson—or for that matter HAL—or other budding or to-be-conceived AI platforms… Despite paranoia and hyperbole surrounding AI since 2001: A Space Odyssey, intelligent computers will not take over the world, although that premise does make for exciting science fiction. While the rise of the machines is not something one should fear, AI systems and their architects have made significant strides in realizing learning machines that can adapt to dense, arcane legal terminology.

Skynet. HAL 9000. The Matrix. The Joshua Computer from WarGames. It’s not hard to look around popular culture and find examples of artificial intelligence (AI) stirring a span of doomsday fears stemming from either a lack of understanding of AI’s dangers to the actual targeting of humans by AI weapons. The names of Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Stephen Hawking, along with several faculty members from academic institutions like Oxford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, are among hundreds of signatures found attached to an open letter published by the Future of Life Institute which calls for “concrete research directions” to pursue for ensuring that AI remains a social benefit.