Electronic Justice

Dmitry Sokolov

In December last year, the San Francisco police asked the city authorities for an unusual permission to use a police robot on the streets of the city, which will be given the right to open fire on criminals. If approval is received, the world will enter a new era when robots will take control of people's lives. However, in a number of countries this is already happening today.

In early February, an interesting incident occurred in Colombia. A judge set to rule in a civil case between an autistic child's mother and an insurance company turned to artificial intelligence programme ChatGPT for advice. It was necessary to find out the statistics of court decisions on the question: should the insurance company cover all financial expenses for transportation, visiting a doctor and treating a sick child. 

Insurers planned to pay only part of them, but the robot programme, after analysing all the nuances of the case, legal norms and judicial practice, sided with the mother of an autistic child. The judge agreed with the opinion of the computer and ruled in favour of the plaintiff.  Robot prosecutors have already appeared in a number of regions of China, and judges are completely obliged to coordinate all their verdicts with a computer. It all started with the fact that in 2016, in one of the districts of Shanghai, the authorities discovered that human prosecutors were completely unable to cope with the amount of work assigned to them. 

We conducted an experiment by assigning an electronic prosecutor to deal with simple administrative and criminal cases. Based on thousands of signs turned into a decision-making algorithm, artificial intelligence analysed cases and issued a draft charge. Not surprisingly, the public asked the authorities a completely logical question: is a computer capable of making the right decision without being able to understand all the intricacies of human relationships. 

To this, the director of the Big Data and Knowledge Management Laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Professor Shi Yuna, said that the machine is only making a charge, while the final decision remains with the judge. But several years have passed, and today the judges of China are obliged to coordinate their decisions with special programmes. At the same time, legally, the last word still remains with the human judge. 

That's only if the verdicts of him and the car diverged, then the judge must write to the name of the higher authorities in the Supreme Court of China a special explanation why he made his own decision, different from the verdict issued by artificial intelligence. Naturally, the human factor played its role. Chinese judges, even if they do not agree with the opinion of the machine, usually try not to contradict it. In this case, the risk of making an incorrect or formal decision has increased many times over.

The situation has become especially complicated since last year, when, as the director of the information centre of the Supreme Court, Xu Jianfeng, told the press, the computers of all the country's judges, without exception, were connected to the artificial intelligence programme. In fact, justice in China has passed into the electronic hands of machines. The question arises which country will be next, and whether this trend will lead to the fact that in 10-15 years humanity will completely fall under the power of artificial intelligence, realising the scenario of the blockbusters "The Matrix" or "Terminator".

- Pravda.ru