Since at least 2016, China has been creating a "smart court" system, intending to improve the "fairness, efficiency, and credibility" of its judges. Now, China is using AI to correct court rulings forcing judges to submit a written explanation to the machine if they disagree.
By suggesting laws, drafting documents, and alerting judges to "perceived human errors" in verdicts, China is employing artificial intelligence to "improve" its judicial system.
In a report on the system released this week, Beijing's Supreme Court stated that judges must now formally consult the AI on every case, and if they choose to deviate from its decision, they must provide a written justification.
Additionally, the AI has been given access to police databases and China's Orwellian social credit system, giving it the authority to penalize individuals, including by immediately listing a thief's property for sale online.
Beijing has praised the new technology for "a significant contribution to the judicial advancement of human civilisation," but critics claim it runs the risk of ushering in a time when machines govern the planet.
Since Chief Justice Qiang Zhou called for the use of technology to enhance the "fairness, efficiency, and credibility" of the legal system at least as far back as 2016, China has begun constructing a "smart court" system.
This required installing robotic receptionists in courthouses to provide online legal assistance, automatic voice recognition recorders in courtrooms to do away with transcription needs, and "virtual courtrooms" where cases could be heard online.
A highly specialized "internet court" that only handles cases involving the virtual world, like online loans, domain name disputes, and copyright issues, has even been established in China.
It has resulted in the development of sizable databases into which data on every case is uploaded at a rate of approximately 100,000 per day.
In order to learn from these cases and then generate judgments and suggestions for new laws based on what it discovers, artificial intelligence has now been integrated into such databases.
This implies the AI is now making choices on behalf of judges who must explain themselves if they want to override it instead of just gathering facts.
The South China Morning Post says that an AI prosecutor has even begun charging individuals in Shanghai with crimes it thinks they are responsible for.
Additionally, by integrating the AI with China's social credit system, it will be able to punish offenders, such as preventing them from buying train or airline tickets if they refuse to pay a fine.
Professor of law at the China University of Political Science and Law, Zhang Linghan, cautioned that the rapid development of AI raises the possibility of a future in which machines reign over people.
In a document that was recently posted online, she asserted that "humans will gradually lose free will with an increasing dependency on technology."
She continued, "we must be alert to the erosion of judicial power by technology companies and capital."
(Editor's note: The term, "artificial intelligence", is often introduced into the narrative by the journalist - not by the software's architects and programmers, who know better.
If you ask those involved in the AI industry to define 'artificial intelligence', they will inevitably say something about needing to first define 'intelligence'. And they will be serious.
We must also define 'artificial'.
Over the past forty years we have worked with thousands of computer programmers, supporting at least a dozen different programming languages. The only language that technically had anything to do with artificial intelligence, was Prolog; and yet, every programming language is designed to extract the fundamental principles underlying a series of decisions and to automate that decision-making, much as a recipe, or an disassembly-reassembly sequence does.
In our opinion, a cookbook is a form of artificial intelligence, and so is a mechanics' manual - the decision-making algorithms are pre-recorded and the reader only needs to follow the instructions, which allow the reader to become artificially experienced. A book is a form of artifice.
More recently, a thermostat does the same thing. It is a made object that does something rudimentarily intelligent without there needing to actually be a human being there to make decisions and do things.
Perhaps automation is a better term than 'AI'.
Because that is what this software does - it automatically processes lists of rules, comparing this case with a bunch of other rules summarized from a bunch of other cases - maybe millions of them - and this is no different, really, then what a judge does, in their head.
But there are so many laws and so many jurisdictions and so many rules and so many updates and so many exceptions that, basically, it is not possible for a human being to carry all of that information in their head and access it in a timely manner.
They will make a ruling that afternoon and then wake up at 3 AM and remember an exception - but, too late, the verdict has already been recorded.
Engineers have been using governors to keep machines from running too fast or too slow for nearly two hundred years, now.
So we should not be too impressed by the use of the words "artificial intelligence" or the acronym "AI". That is clickbait.
What is the real story?
The real story is that this software is probably an expert system.
Expert systems have been around forever. They are your basic series of questions - before computers, they existed as paper checklists. Programmers convert the checklist items into a series of IF-THEN statements.
Serious people still use paper checklists to enhance their memory and make sure they did not forget anything. What makes automation attractive is its ability to deal with vast amounts of data, such as multi-volume, multi-decade corporate lawsuits, and to follow every detail without fail, distraction, boredom or emotional bias.
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We cite The "Honorable" Christopher Wilson, up top, because in JV160250, he found the accused guilty of child abuse, and ordered the accused's name added to the state child abuse registry.
The Honorable Judge Wilson, or 'Chris', as his friends call him, based his verdict upon the fact that the accused had foolishly admitted, in court, that he had once described his child's room as a "pig sty".
We think that The Honorable Judge Wilson felt comfortable doing this because it was a juvenile court - no public, no jury, no witnesses other than he and the court personnel.
The "Honorable" Judge Wilson threatened the accused - that would be your humble editor - with six months of imprisonment if we told anyone.
Those would be your tax dollars that are at work, citizen - and mine, too.
We describe this as cowardly, bullying behavior and we suspect that Judge Wilson is a coward and a bully in private, too - just sayin'.
However, immediately after the hearing someone who had been witness to The Honorable Judge Wilson's not-so-discreet abuse of his authority, informed the Presiding Judge of the Humboldt Superior Court, of The Honorable Judge Wilson's abuse of his authority, and The Honorable Joyce Hinrichs confiscated the case from Judge Wilson, much as The Honorable Judge Wilson had confiscated our daughter from us.
Judge Hinrichs is actually a pretty straight shooter. We wish there were more in the county like her. We hear she makes a mean cheesecake.
If The "Honorable" Christopher Wilson had bothered to use a checklist, like a serious person, the first thing on that list would have been "EVIDENCE" - followed by "WITNESSES". It wasn't. He wasn't. We think it was a planned character assassination. Nice shootin', Tex'.
We don't think an AI would stoop so low as to voluntarily agree with The Honorable Judge Wilson's verdict. It takes a human to do that.
That is why we need software - because people like Christopher Wilson cannot be trusted to do simple tasks correctly - and because software doesn't lie to itself or cheat those who are forced to depend upon its honesty. It just does its job.
China has figured this out. We have not.
Once again, Asia has bested the oh-so-superior West ... and left fabulous California in the dust, along with its fables about technological superiority.
We all know why - there's no money in replacing a largely crooked or incompetent judiciary with software, or, if there is, it is outweighed by the loss of income from being unable to influence verdicts behind the scenes - these are our values and this is what we stand for, in the eyes of the world, and, no, I am not being ironic.
When it becomes obvious that everything that preceded the switchover was actually naked corruption and justice for sale, heads will roll - most of them belonging to people with law degrees.
The United States oligarchy - composed almost entirely of lawyers, not engineers - thinks it can keep this up forever. It has no Plan B.
But we downloaded a cool piece of software a few years ago - called YOLO, developed to run on Linux, it does facial recognition of images and, frame by frame, of video feeds, too, putting a neat little neon box around each object that it has been programmed to recognize. Under the hood, the software runs a neural network.
We ported this Linux software to FreeBSD with a little effort, compiled it, and ran it against a bunch of pictures of our kids. It worked fine. It runs on our five- or ten-year-old laptop. No server required. No big iron. Just time.
In terms of the burden this task places upon the computer: compared to image recognition, parsing legal text is child's play.
If and when China decides to post the source code for their software-based legal expert system online, it will only take someone at a college somewhere a few days or a few weeks to install it on their laptop, load it up with California decisions, California precedents, and California cases, turn it loose, and publish the results on their blog, for others to verify, independently.
Some of us have been waiting for this to happen for forty years. The algorithmization of law has been a topic of discussion on USENET and other concentrations of Internet-based brain power for at least four decades, now. The parallels between the IF-THENs of the programming world, and the IF-THENs of the legal world are too obvious to conceal forever.
So, all you lawyers, lying and scheming and kissing ass to claw your way up the ladder and get appointed to the judiciary for life, can just forget it, and get back to work. Focus on what you're doing, before one of those pieces of software flags your work to the law firm that employs you, as sub-standard, and you find yourself on the street with the rest of us. We suggest you start thinking about how you are going to pay off your law school bills after your legal skills become obsolete.
The sharpest minds in Humboldt County law enforcement are probably looking at that YOLO software and thinking that would be pretty useful for automatically extracting framed closeups of suspects and witnesses from security videos of traffic and crowds.
(It's also pretty good at detecting concealed handbags, LOL)
You have The Honorable Judge Wilson to thank for its unavailability - we applied repeatedly to many IT positions in Humboldt County and were always turned down, probably because we, a former court-appointed foster parent for the City & County of San Francisco, are now on the state registry of child abusers, for life.
Guess you're going to have locate, download, and compile it yourselves. Sorry about that.
Food for thought.)