
Ask HN: Why don't we automate justice? - strahil
Bulgaria recently is shaken with corruption scandals in the judicial system. It made me think where the fault is. Trying to look through different angles, I always seem to end up finding the error in the human act of knowingly breaking the rules.<p>So why don&#x27;t we remove the human error factor and simply automate justice as a set of rules, defined by the law makers, executed by developers, with unit tests accompying every law? Lawyers and prosecutors can each present a logical argument on why they think their side should win, (a jury will decide), and an AI will give out the sentence. Should the issue hit an exception, a judge can intercept the case manually.<p>Am I missing anything? Because this, excluding the politics (unavoidable human factor), sounds too easy.
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whoshallsucceed
Justice is not a binary thing. For example, given a same crime committed by 2+
different persons, punishment can't be the same because of the personnalities,
the reasons that led each one to do what they did.

I've read that for 20 to 30 years, the US tried to make justice somewhat
automated by providing some kind of grids the judges had to stick to. They
stopped in 2005 because it was really not working.

You should read "Practical Wisdom" for a starter. There is more in this book
than justice but everything is worth reading so you won't waste your time :)

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minimaxir
You may want to watch a few science fiction movies. :p

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strahil
Yes, but the submarine was once sci-fi too :)

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minimaxir
Less on the "impossible" aspect, more on the "really bad things happen when
justice is treated as black and white."

And _really_ bad things happen with AI and justice.

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jlg23
a) You are missing that the human error factor is still present in the
automatisation itself. Only you don't send one person to prison by mistake for
an offense, but maybe a lot of people for a class of offenses. "Ooops, off-by-
one error in Judge 1.1, 5 innocent people executed. Patch forthcoming."

b) One cannot encode laws in programs; a judge's task is to interpret the
meaning of the words and apply them to a case. This is rarely done in local
courts (which mostly really just follow a schema), but higher courts, at least
in functional democracies, do actually look at the circumstances under which a
law was created.

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bobby_9x
Computers and algorithms have no compassion. It would be very difficult to
send someone to prision based on justice bot 2.0.

It's bad enough when companies like Amazon use bots to do their dirty work to
ban marketplace sellers.

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jacalata
Try reading about mandatory sentencing, which was basically an effort to
remove discretion from judges and these days is considered a giant failure.

