Artificial Intelligent (AI) device is breaking a new frontier as robot will be assuming the role of a de facto “lawyer,” by defending a human in court.
According to a January 4th report from NewScientist, the AI will run on a smartphone and listen to all speech in the courtroom in February before instructing the defendant on what to say via an earpiece.
The AI was created by a company called DoNotPay which was founded by Joshua Browder and is described as a chatbot. The robot was initially created to appeal parking tickets in the UK and was designed in a chat format but has now expanded to provide other services which include college fee waivers, connecting people with inmates, helping out users with bills and rent, facilitating divorce certificates, handling cancelled and delayed flights, payment protection insurance and more.
According to Joshua Browder, lawyers charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for just basic communication and language. He believes the invention of the robot lawyer will one day replace human lawyers.
‘There’ll still be a lot of good lawyers out there who may be arguing in the European Court of Human Rights, but a lot of lawyers are just charging way too much money to copy and paste documents and I think they will definitely be replaced, and they should be replaced.’
The AI has been trained on factual statements to ‘minimize legal liability, and its audio tool has been tweaked to ensure that it doesn’t react to statements instantly, but instead, lets the offence finish their discussion, analyze comments and then present a solution.
The first AI court trial will be held in February, with details like specific dates and locations being protected by the app.
While an AI robot lawyer is definitely an experiment and creates a degree of risk for the defendant, it opens some interesting doors for the future of artificial intelligence.
