Could We (or Should We) Really Design Artificial Legal Intelligence Without Human Oversight?
“So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means only.”
Adding too many past ethics traumas, I remember one of the most ethically disturbing moments of my life. It was early 2018; I came across a news article mentioning a Silicon Valley health startup Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes, unfortunately, misled thousands of customers and investors by claiming that a small device the company invented only needed a few drops of blood to run a blood analysis and that you would not need to pay more than $1.99 for a single test. This, of course, was perceived as a big disruption to the disproportionately expensive and subjectively-broken American Healthcare system. She had always refused to explain how this device actually worked by playing the ‘trade secret card.’ Nevertheless, it turns out there was no such a device, but there was, in fact, a huge fraud going on. Unfortunate enough, Holmes only paid $500,000 as a fine, with criminal charges still pending. Fast reverse winding, ProPublica, an investigative journalism non-profit, published a report in 2016 on COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions), which is used to determine a defendant’s likelihood of recidivism…
