This "AI Lawyer" is about a traffic ticket. If we want to make things more fair while also enforcing the laws on the book it seems like the more straightforward tech solution is to improve traffic cameras/monitors such that tickets are given out more appropriately. Or, if it still goes to court, why not just have a system where someone can represent themselves with a form or checklist which points out the reasons they were given a ticket by mistake?
Perhaps this is a good business model in the current system but its definitely not the best for society as a whole. Why do we need lawyer of any type to handle something as banal as speeding tickets?
You should be asking what are the incentives.
> like the more straightforward tech solution is to improve traffic cameras/monitors such that tickets are given out more appropriately
This is not straightforward from a bureaucratic sense. There is no strong incentive (that I can identify - humanitarian ideals do not count) to improve the functionality here to make traffic tickets and their resolutions more sensible.
However, an AI that can resolve traffic tickets and citations might incentive a city to start gathering data more effectively - to win cases and get revenue - and that is a great incentive to improve the general tech.
> Why do we need lawyer of any type to handle something as banal as speeding tickets?
I also want to mention that this is a great point. The fact that my job provides legal insurance, the end result being I can get out of my traffic tickets by hiring a lawyer for free to show up and ask for a dismissal, is pretty dumb.
This is itself a normative statement.
I’m of the opinion that incentives aren’t the only thing worth considering — there’s something to be said for enshrining ethics into law (if only because it can adjust incentives).
Another thing worth considering is our mediocre track record of identifying incentives ahead of time.
Either way the government is not purely incentivized to increase funds. Standard fines for traffic violations are changed up or down all the time. Sometimes cities decide their current traffic enforcement is too burdensome and they cut back on tickets. There could be political actors which have incentives to improve it. Whether or not it will ever happen is not clear but I dont think its impossible by any means.
You don't. Just show up in court and talk to the judge. That's how it's currently handled. Lawyers aren't involved in the traffic courts I've seen.
They basically always offer some bullshit non-moving violation to make me go away. Saves me thousands on insurance premiums and has also saved me from a criminal record for my more serious tickets (like allegedly driving gasp 36 mph by a school, which apparently comes with jail time in Ohio).
Bring on the hate. Y'all know I speak truth.
"Always"? I have never ended up in traffic court.
> Bring on the hate. Y'all know I speak truth.
Who would doubt that you are the antisocial person you portray yourself as?
A good lawyer is not just knowledgeable of law, but of people. He needs to get 12 people in front of him to agree with him. And he may even be actively misleading them when he's defending a someone whom he knows to be guilty. This comes down to reading people, reading reactions, and understanding what each of those 12 people needs to hear to have them act like he wants. Not coincidentally, the most common background of politicians: lawyers.
I'd argue that the most likely scenario here is not closing the divide but widening it. Instead of public defenders, poor people will just get the bot, while those of means will get lawyers. It's akin to tech support today. In the not so distant past, it was easy to get a human on the line. Now in many cases unless you're a "special" client, or get your issue on the front page of some big social media site, you get the bot. And it sucks.
Public defenders would be more effective if they didn't have to talk to their clients?
For a natural text generation/chat system like ChatGPT, at the moment this is effectively impossible and frankly I don't see it being sufficiently fixed for something as complex as teaching law to a non-law-student any time in the near future.
It's not like a "jailhouse lawyer" will do any better. Though it might cost something you didn't expect, such as a new witness against you or a shower pal.
The Constitution is already pushed beyond all reason for poor people anyway. You might have a "right" to a public defender, but good luck getting them to spend much more than 10 minutes on your case. (https://www.mprnews.org/story/2010/11/29/public-defenders) They're so overworked that it can be impossible for them to spend more than a tiny fraction of the time they actually need to do their job (https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article237036919...).
In the same way you have a "right" to speedy trial, but unless you're rich you can spend years (or even a decade) waiting behind bars (https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/8/17/23310771/why-some-spend-ye...).
It seems like we've already decided that if you can't pay the court fees you aren't entitled to access to our "justice" system (https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/sulr/vol44/iss3/11/)
I don't think it's too far fetched to imagine the courts telling poor people they have to settle for an AI to represent them unless they can fork over the money to hire one themselves.
If an AI is just as capable (if not more capable) than a real lawyer, we'll be seeing rich people and corporations using them instead of humans. Until we see that, I'll assume that if poor people are forced (by law or finances) to use them they'll be getting the short end of the stick.
1. A scaling army of prosecutors and "professional witnesses" which are compensated/promoted based on conviction rate.
2. A single "freely" provided and extremely overworked defense attorney with three times the caseload of the prosecutor and where every bit of help they give out takes from the time of the other defendants they "defend."
3. As a result of 1&2 you are pressured to sign a plea and threatened with triple and quadruple punishments for the same activities. All while being stuck in a cell (why else would you need a free attorney)? And we are not talking the difference of 3 months and a year. Instead we are talking about the difference of 5 years and 20 years.
4. The result is an overwhelming number of factually innocent people in prison for crimes they never committed. From people who sat down and said, what happens if it goes wrong vs what happens when I do 5 years of adult daycare?
So yes, any kind of AI is likely to improve the situation as the situation is currently completely unacceptable to anyone who has seen a family member go through it.
While I agree with you that AI powered lawyer can have many downsides and drawbacks here you are building on a falsehood.
There is this illusions that computers are "book smart" but not "street smart". It is very deeply ingrained into our culture. Just think about Data from Star Trek. Very analytical, but struggles to understand emotions. Therefore also struggles to manipulate people's emotions, aka being emotionally persuasive.
This is a sci-fi trope, but is false as it comes to these generative models. (or can be false depending on training data) If you train the system with mock juries it can learn how to twist them around its finger. Text written by such a model can be as emotionally persuasive as one written by the best lawyer.
In fact in reality, as the tech is today, it would be easier to reliably implement the "reading reactions, and understanding what each of those 12 people needs to hear to have them act like he wants" part than the "follows flawless logic, legal technicalities to a T" part.
It is of course still a very perilous path to make an AI-powered lawyer. It is just important to not base our reasoning on sci-fi tropes
Come to think about it. This part can be valuable, even as a startup. You get mock juries, you act out legal cases in front of them. You collect every single thing the actor lawyers say, and how they say it, and you also collect full transcript of their deliberations.
You model the data, and then you sell the services to lawyers. They can practice in front of your model jury initialised with what can be known about the real jurors and can see traces of their deliberations. Not just one run of the model, but many runs if they want to.
The defendant is the person on trial.
If you had 1 lawyer per 100 people in 1800 and you had 1 lawyer per 100 people today, I don't see a scaling problem with population.
Indeed in the UK in 2012 there were 120,000 solicitors for 64 million
Today it's 160,000 for 68 million
That's a 30% increase in lawyers with a 6% increase in population.
Why do we need more lawyers per person today than 10 years ago?
How many more laws are there? Being a lawyer is like 90% reading and collating documents to filter out relevant information. We have a lot more law and a lot more documentation to sift through these days.
That institutional knowledge disappears upon a successful disruption. The startup will now be faced with learning these things over again, “breaking things” in the process.
Once enough growth has happened, monetizing via ads or increased pricing occurs. After this, you may have to squint your eyes a bit to tell if the situation before was all that much worse- or merely consisted of a different set of trade-offs.
Uber comes to mind. Facebook as well.
This strikes me as a bizarre thing to say and I'm curious what meaning you ascribe to this statement.
What would be the value of counting such a thing? Why would you want your tax dollars spent on such a task?
[0] https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2013/03/frequent-reference-questio...
Given the Option A (letting DoJ prosecutors only have to carry around Title 18) versus Option B (letting lay people looking up a topic by subject matter see what crimes and penalties pertain to that subject matter in the title for that subject matter), which one is friendlier to lawyers? Which one is friendlier to lay people?
Yeah, a DoJ official in 1982 probably found it inconvenient that 17 U.S.C. § 506 and 18 U.S.C. § 2319 aren't in the same deadtree volume for them to lug around. But if I'm a lay person, I'm glad that the criminal penalties for copyright infringement aren't invisible from within the chapter on copyright infringement in the title on copyright.
If I were to perform a code review for a junior engineer, and they had structured their source files so that all the constructors and destructors for all of their classes were in one independent file, rather than co-located with the classes to which they pertain, they would not pass code review. The argument that it's difficult to even know how many constructors and destructors they have, and therefore memory management is too complex, would be distinctly unpersuasive. It baffles and frustrates me that HN seems to come to the exact opposite conclusion with regard to the law.
The only reason this system works is because of privacy. Without it the system is just broken. But even with privacy it makes the system about luck.
That is obviously untrue. Why do you feel the need to make obviously false claims to support your position?
You need to obey the UCMJ?
You need to obey campaign finance laws?
You need to obey the Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge Act?
You need to obey state law as incorporated by the Assimilative Crimes Act in jurisdictions you've never been to?
You need to obey HIPAA? The Privacy Act? The Freedom of Information Act?
A huge number of laws simply do not apply to you if you aren't engaged in a particular activity. E.g., you are not a covered entity for HIPAA unless you work for a medical provider or insurer. And a huge proportion of those criminal penalties only apply to government employees, not to average civilians at all.
Also, there's the problem that you don't know what is written in the laws that you don't know. Maybe it does pertain to you, but without knowing the law you can't know that.
This is _caused_ by technology, you usually don't solve a problem by adding more of its cause
The solution seems clear - poor people just need to run billion dollar advertising campaigns to improve their support.