Electronic Filing--Part Two
You have just completed the final review of your brief for summary judgment and have electronically sent it to your, administrative assistant, a software program that will automatically put the brief in the filing format required by the court and send it along in a few nanoseconds.
As you lift your finger from the enter button, your e-mail announces that you have just received notice from the court that a decision has been filed on your motion. You quickly open the opinion and go to last page—you lost. You begin reading to find out why and as you do it becomes clear to you that the software judicial decision simulation package you bought a few months ago and used to give your client an optimistic assessment of the outcome must have had a bug.
You pick up the phone and make a call to the simulation software vendor, hoping to get an explanation before you call your client. He tells you that you are the fifth call he has had concerning the problem—the programmers are reviewing the software and the problem does not seem to be in their system; the judicial conference had announced that the robot judges had just been reprogrammed with the amendments to the statute and the bug must be in their newest patch.
Sound crazy—perhaps not as crazy as you think. I just took a look at the last edition of WESLEYAN, the magazine produced by my alma mater, and noticed an article entitled “Can Robots Tell Right From Wrong”. It was about a book, (Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong, Oxford University Press 2009) by a former class mate, Wendell Wallach ’68, and his presentation at one of the seminars at Home Coming.
I have not read the book and the article was more about Wendell and how he got to this point, but there was one notable feature in his background that was particularly interesting. Wendell had applied to Harvard Law School and was wait listed, but was accepted at the Divinity School which he attended for a year, apparently continuing to explore a series of post graduate educational experiences which never resulted in degrees, but obviously contributed to developing a creative and thoughtful mind and spirit.
So are Robot Judges in our future? Wendell, who is now has been consulting at Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, says that “[n]o one has convinced him that we understand enough about human intelligence” to be able to program a machine to make moral and ethical decisions like humans. He describes himself, however, as a “friendly skeptic”. What is a friendly skeptic? To me a friendly skeptic is someone who grew up watching with amazement the fictional computer of the Enterprise in Star Trek who is typing this on a laptop which is far more powerful, often depends on my GPS to tell me which is the fastest way to a given location and has a portfolio whose value can dramatically change based on the decisions of numerous machines as to when to buy or sell.
