Law in the future

It may be a hundred years before a computer beats humans at Go – maybe even longer.

– Dr Piet Hut, Institute for Advanced Study, 1997¹

In early 2016, an artificially intelligent machine defeated grandmaster Lee Sodol in a game of Go. The victory for machines seemed unthinkable to fans of Go, who had proudly boasted that a computer would not come close to mastering this ‘uniquely human game.’ The game was seen as being too subtle and too beautiful for a machine; successful players relied on human intuition and judgment rather than brute force computation.

This victory in Go is just the latest example of a monotonic trend of machines outperforming and out-thinking humans. The victory comes just five years after IBM’s Watson defeated the grandmasters of the trivia game show Jeopardy! and less than twenty years after a computer defeated grandmaster Garry Kasparov in chess. These victories for machines were also unthinkable just a few years before.

Machines do not just outperform and outsmart humans in ‘games.’ They also outperform and outsmart humans in the labour market. Algorithms – devoid of emotion and bias; free from fatigue – have been shown to be better forecasters than the ablest of humans. These algorithms are increasingly used in insurance, finance, medicine, and human resources. In the world of baseball, for example, it would be considered folly today to rely on a scout’s human instinct and hunches instead of statistical analysis to predict which players are likely to perform well in the major leagues. The baseball teams that innovated first and adapted to the new world of data analysis were the teams that outperformed their competition.²

The set of tasks and activities in which humans are strictly superior to computers is becoming vanishingly small. Machines today not only perform mechanical or manual tasks once performed by humans, but they are also performing thinking tasks, where it was long believed that human judgment was indispensable. From self-driving cars to self-flying planes, and from robots performing surgery on a pig to artificially intelligent personal assistants, so much of what was once unimaginable is now reality.

But this is just the beginning of the big data and artificial intelligence revolution. Technology continues to improve at an exponential rate.³ Over the past fifty years, computing speed, power, and capacity have doubled every two years or so. The ability to collect, store, process, and analyze data continues to increase at an exponential rate. It has been predicted that, in terms of calculations per second, computers will have the capacity of a human brain in the next twenty years.⁴

It is intuitively very difficult for humans to appreciate the immense power of exponential growth. Doubling speed every two years may not seem that impressive, but these technological improvements will lead to massive change over time. Take the analogy of human walking speed. Imagine that human walking speed doubled every two years. In less than fifty years, a human would be able to walk from the earth to the moon and back in less than a minute.⁵

How will the big data and artificial intelligence revolution affect law? This is the question we explore in three articles in this Focus Feature. We hypothesize that the growth of big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning will have important effects that will fundamentally change the way law is made, learned, followed, and practised.

Of course, there are sceptics. Some believe machines will never be able to perform the tasks currently performed by lawmakers, judges, and lawyers. Law is special, they argue. And an understanding of law requires deep philosophical and moral reasoning skills that machines can never replicate. This scepticism, however, is in much the same vein as the scepticism of whether a computer could beat a human at chess, Jeopardy!, or Go. It is similar to the scepticism expressed by scouts in baseball about the value of statistics. It echoes the same scepticism of earlier industries undergoing technological change. ‘Our industry is different,’ the sceptics might say. In the face of enormous...