Can the computer take the place of the judge?

Because of the ineffectual position the United Nations has been thrust into by the United States in the war against Saddam Hussein, and as the war winds down to a grave problem of lawlessness in a leadership vacuum, I got to thinking about law and order, and what these words truly mean, especially the word "law."

For law is at the very heart of our civilized existence, and is what produces order in the business, commercial and social world. I have retained the concept of law in my mind as the most critical and the most penetrating political and social institution in all civilized democracies today, and is the very crux of all social and political movements whether upholding the social engineering of the left or strengthening that invisible economic hand of the right. The law is our moral and societal standard against which we ourselves can judge the business, personal and social lives of others.

Should men, however, be able to break laws because they know that they can get away with it, then, as stressed in the book Human Involution by Ramon K. Ilusorio? If so, then, the author says, the very foundation of justice is threatened. "The more complex the details of the law and the larger the bureaucracy required to administer it, the greater the latitude to operate around it. Today, the system of law lends itself to just this situation: it is growing more complex and detailed to the point sometimes of being petty or absurd; the bureaucracy needed to apply it is vast and, because of this, slow and inefficient; its complexity and size have created a structure with its own vested interests to protect – those of the people administering it."

Ilusorio goes on to say that the legal system’s "convolutions have nourished a professional elite – the lawyers – whose interpretative and courtroom skills are compensated in direct relation to the intricacies they have a real concern in spawning." Saying that the explosive growth of positive laws also makes a society "more litigious and more combative," he says that "to the extent the rules are not applied fairly and respected, they fertilize the breeding grounds for social conflict." Ilusorio dramatically ends this paragraph by saying, "We have arrived at justice already imprisoned."

Wasn’t it Thoreau who pointed out sometime in the mid-1800s, that in any legal society, however, "it is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right." And that’s precisely the reason why, because of man’s tragic vulnerability to convolution and manipulation of the legal and judicial systems, and because we are living today in an age of great technological progress and achievement, that the questions have to be asked: can computers take the place of judges...can adjudications be handed down by a machine...can the judicial functions be automated?

As early as the 1960s, a number of leading specialists in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) genuinely seemed to believe that computers were set to become as intelligent as human beings. Sometime in the late Sixties, my late husband brought me to a dinner-reunion of the Hasty Pudding Club, an undergraduate club of Harvard College, of which he was a member in his student days. He was in New York training at Morgan Guaranty and Trust and had looked forward to one specific weekend when the dinner was supposed to be held where he would once again see his former classmates and friends. This became extremely memorable for me because this was the first time we would go back to Harvard Square after we got married.

What made the dinner exciting for me was the presence of Herbert Simon who had just become a Nobel Prize winner having predicted, about half a decade earlier, that within 20 years, machines would be capable of doing any work that a man could do. Simon was the guest speaker and mixed enthusiastically with the guests after dinner. Although some fierce critics of his, in the years thereafter, would subject his treatises to ridicule and sarcasm, he gave AI the kind of attention that it hadn’t had before, and found dramatic support in one of AI’s founding fathers, Marvin Minsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a neighbor-university of Harvard, who, rather dramatically, stated in a treatise of his own that, "We would be lucky if the next generation of computer systems are willing to keep us, human beings, around the house as household pets!"

Though a couple of decades have elapsed, current computer technology still constrains the user so that when she requires something of her machine, this cannot be expressed fully in natural language (such as English or French), but rather is achieved by using some formal language (i.e. structured English-like statements or programming language) or by choosing from some predefined set of instructions. In short, computers are not able currently, to process natural language. They may accept natural language as input but what they thereafter do with it, within the context of present capabilities using today’s technologies, is still rather hit and miss.

What I am trying to say is that although modern systems are now tremendously sophisticated, advanced, and versatile, the traditional tale which I have heard more than once, of a computer system translating "out of sight, out of mind" into "invisible insanity" is a classic example. So with another phrase which I’m sure you have heard of, where the computer translated "hydraulic ram" into "water sheep." For that matter, perhaps you haven’t still heard about the computer’s translation of "love the second time around" into "sexual intercourse twice."

The lesson to be learned from the above is that human beings’ ability to understand natural language derives not only from our insight into particular words, but very especially, from the human’s appreciation of the wider context in which words are used. The challenge now of natural language processing is that of endorsing a computer with sufficient information and knowledge to provide it with precisely this wider appreciation. Also, the great technologists of the world still have to inculcate common sense into the computer. But everyone who is abreast with IT knows that "commonsense reasoning" is in the works. The difficulty with common sense and general knowledge is that there is an awful lot of it and still so much of this remains unarticulated.

One basic argument runs in favor of the human judge of course. In addition to what has been said above, when there are gaps in the law, judges are very urgently required to adjudicate today, and no doubt tomorrow as well. And of course the moral issue cannot help but come to the fore...so long as we accept the primacy of human beings as the basic moral unit in society, then we would have difficulty in accepting and justifying certain conflicts between humans being resolved by non-human forces...in fact, by machines!

What are those areas of social life which ought not, from the moral point of view, to be subjected to or replaced by some variant of IT? What is true today is the fact that there are many cases with no significant moral dimension, which may, in principle, be disposed of more effectively by some form of diagnostic systems technique, even if the technology to enable this is not yet sufficiently refined.

Remember that movie where Robin Williams, as a bicentennial robot, falls in love with the daughter of the master he was programmed to serve? Is that at all possible? You will right now say, no. Even if it were possible to program computers to exhibit, for instance, social, religious, sexual, and political preferences, on a parallel with those actually held by judges in the rendering of justice or injustice, it may be rejected as morally undesirable.

But the sickness of injustice, the reality of the corrupt judge, and the ugliness of the vicious powerful lawyer, are such overwhelming evils right now that I cannot help but go back to the Ilusorio theory which I know many subscribe to, that the judicial system has "become a tool for profit of those with the power to manipulate it and less a refuge of justice for those who have no other recourse or comfort."

This is the reason for that yearning for a diagnostic and antiseptic machine to adjudicate, programmed with the moral, social, religious, sexual, and political dimensions. Imprisoned justice be damned...remember what one great man said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."