by Mark Ollig
©Mark Ollig
Geographically located southeast of Australia, New Zealand
is undertaking the legalities of artificial intelligence (AI).
“A three-year project to evaluate legal and policy implications
of artificial intelligence for New Zealand,” reads the message on the
Artificial Intelligence and Law webpage of New Zealand’s University of Otago.
All of us have some understanding of what artificial
intelligence is.
Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines artificial
intelligence as “an area of computer science that deals with giving machines
the ability to seem like they have human intelligence; the capability of a
machine to imitate intelligent human behavior.”
AI will be merged with future autonomously driven cars,
robotics and machines used in manufacturing companies, healthcare facilities,
businesses, and in-home Internet of Things (IoT) devices; including the home
vacuum cleaner of the future I mentioned in last week’s column.
Please note this column will continue to be written by a
human; namely, yours truly.
AI technologies are able to learn and adapt for themselves,
according to Professor Colin Gavaghan, head of the University of Otago’s
three-year project: Artificial Intelligence and Law.
“Posing fascinating legal, practical, and ethical
challenges,” are among concerns mentioned about AI technologies, according to
Gavaghan.
“If intelligent machines are employed by companies, might we
need legal mechanisms for defining their obligations and rights? Should they
perhaps be regarded as ‘legal persons,’ for some purposes?” These are two of
the questions being addressed by the Artificial Intelligence and Law project.
This project is funded by a $400,000 grant from the New
Zealand Law Foundation organization.
This organization sites a specific application being used by
some police departments here in the US called PredPol, a crime prevention
software platform.
Being curious, I visited their website and learned PredPol
means “predictive policing.”
PredPol began as a research project with UCLA (University of
California, Los Angeles), and the Los Angeles Police Department.
Using historical data, mathematicians, behavioral
scientists, and police data, they determined the three best pieces of
information to use for crime forecasting are: crime type, crime location, and
crime data and time.
“The theory is that you prevent them from committing the
crime to begin with . . . burglars and thieves work in a mathematical way,
whether they know it or not,” said Police Chief Galen Carroll of Modesto, CA,
in a quote taken from the Modesto Bee newspaper.
“Predictive policing” is a term I had not heard of before,
but it reminds me of the 2002 Steven Spielberg sci-fi movie, “Minority Report.”
This movie takes place in 2054, and finds law enforcement
using a “future-seeing” division called the Pre-Crime unit.
The protagonist; Chief John Anderton, played by actor Tom
Cruise, is arrested long before he commits the crime for which he is charged: a
homicide Anderton is seen carrying out – in the future.
The website for PredPol is http://www.predpol.com.
Some law firms are currently using artificial intelligence
legal services provided by a Canadian company called ROSS Intelligence.
Their website’s front page reads: “Supercharge lawyers with
artificial intelligence.”
ROSS (not an acronym) is an artificial intelligence,
cloud-based, legal assistant program human lawyers can consult with from any
Internet-accessible device.
Legal research can be supported by using ROSS, proposes the
ROSS Intelligence YouTube video titled: “Meet ROSS, Your Brand New Artificially
Intelligent Lawyer.”
This video can be seen at http://bit.ly/2krsB36.
Questions can be asked of ROSS using the same natural
language one would use speaking with a human lawyer.
Andrew Arruda, a former lawyer, and co-founder of ROSS
Intelligence, recently gave a detailed presentation about artificial
intelligence and how ROSS operates, during a Council of Bars and Law Societies
of Europe (CCBE) conference in France.
He nicely summed up AI as four technologies: machine
learning, natural language processing, visual recognition, and speech
recognition.
Arruda said they created ROSS to answer legal research
questions, and intelligently collaborate with the human lawyer performing the
research.
He also stated how ROSS becomes “smarter each and every
single day” through its interactions with human lawyers.
Andrew Arruda’s informative presentation was uploaded to
YouTube by CCBE, and can be watched here: http://bit.ly/2kR1KP9.
Young people studying to become a lawyer may want to
consider the legal research services provided by an AI lawyer assistant.
You can freely interact with this HI (human intelligence) via Twitter at @bitsandbytes.
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