Artificial Intelligence will continue to be a major trend for the future as people attempt to apply it in more ‘creative’ ways. One of the most dangerous application proposals has come from the legal system, where AI, being touted for its supposed “neutrality”, has been proposed to serve as a judge in court cases instead of a human, where it is said that a “program” could be more objective. Such an idea is as insulting as it is preposterous, because a machine is not a human being, and a man is more than a machine. However, to a godless society filled with heathen ideas and ruled by a cabal of those who, as Wisdom 2 warns, care nothing for the spiritual and place all of their hopes in the material and indulging themselves at the expense of other because they see nothing more that what in before them.
It is therefore not a surprise that the Chinese government, known for her vicious anti-religious laws and enforcement as well as her inhuman treatment of fellow Chinamen, has become the first nation in the world to seriously implement the use of “AI judges” at Chinese courts, where humans submit themselves to a machine.
Artificial-intelligence judges, cyber-courts, and verdicts delivered on chat apps — welcome to China’s brave new world of justice spotlighted by authorities this week.
China is encouraging digitisation to streamline case-handling within its sprawling court system using cyberspace and technologies like blockchain and cloud computing, China’s Supreme People’s Court said in a policy paper.
The efforts include a “mobile court” offered on popular social media platform WeChat that has already handled more than three million legal cases or other judicial procedures since its launch in March, according to the Supreme People’s Court.
The paper was released this week as judicial authorities gave journalists a glimpse inside a “cyber court” — the country’s first — established in 2017 in the eastern city of Hangzhou to deal with legal disputes that have a digital aspect.
In a demonstration, authorities showed how the Hangzhou Internet Court operates, featuring an online interface with litigants appearing by video chat as an AI judge — complete with on-screen avatar — prompts them to present their cases.
“Does the defendant have any objection to the nature of the judicial blockchain evidence submitted by the plaintiff?” the black-robed virtual judge sitting under China’s national emblem asked in a pre-trial meeting.
“No objection,” a human plaintiff answered.
Cases handled at the Hangzhou court include online trade disputes, copyright cases, and e-commerce product liability claims. Litigants can register their civil complaints online and later log on for their court hearing.
Putting simple functions like that in the hands of the virtual judge helps ease the burden on human justices, who monitor the proceedings and make the major rulings in each case, officials said.
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The “mobile court” option on WeChat — China’s leading social-media messaging platform — allows users to complete case filings, hearings, and evidence exchange without physically appearing in court.
It has been launched in 12 provinces and regions, authorities said.
Courts nationwide are experimenting with a range of online tools, said Zhou Qiang, chief justice and president of the Supreme People’s Court.
He told a panel on Thursday that as of October more than 90 percent of China’s courts had handled cases online to some extent. (source)
Take careful note of this trend, because it will likely come to the Western world at some point.
The concept of a human being subject to the decisions of a machine has been a nightmare scenario that science fiction novels and films have warned about for decades. Two examples come to mind.
In literature, there is the infamous short story I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, about the last five members of the human race who survived a nuclear holocaust caused by AI machines who decided that humanity needed to be exterminated. However, those last five survivors have awoken to a new horror as there is a computer still that is powerful enough to rule over them and control them down to their physical actions. The five hatch a plan to kill each other or commit suicide in order to escape the machine. Four are able to follow through with their plan but the final one, the one who thought of the plan, is caught by the machine and the machine plus itself into him and physically mutates him into a sort of jelly that is now assimilated into the machine. Since he cannot follow through on his plan, nor can he flee the machine any more, and that his physical body is just a blob now but is still alive, he can only say in thoughts “I have no mouth, but I must scream.”
In film, there is one of the most famous Hollywood villains ever created in the character of the “HAL-9000” computer, an AI-type machine who turns against a space shuttle crew and decides to kill them. It is for one of the crew members to deactivate the computer, and as he is working towards to the switch he has to use to turn the program off, the computer is taunting him in a very plain-toned voice. The character was so haunting that actor Anthony Hopkins said during his character study for the role of the homosexual psychologist and cannibal serial killer Hannibal Lecter in the film The Silence Of The Lambs, he based the award-winning performance on the character of HAL-9000.
Both of these stories are fiction, but they represent the dehumanization of man at the hands of a machine. In the case of modern times, a new tyranny would rather seem to take the form of a human being acting behind a machine to dehumanize others while being able to legally and mentally divorce himself from the direct act. Thus for the Chinese, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) could use AI judges and, given that these things have to be programmed, even incline them to be programmed to consistently generate favorable results, and then say when a ruling is given that they did not do anything, but that it was the computer.
The question of who is programming the AI, and who are the companies or groups who build the AI are the main questions. Certainly the facts of judicial corruption, especially from prosecutors and judges is well-known, but human beings are able to be scrutinized. It is not only harder to scrutinize a machine, as it involves having to investigate hardware, software, and those who built it from the programmers to the company bosses, but also due to the “third party” nature of a computer, people will generally say that the computer is “objective” as opposed to a person. For all of the claims that a bias cannot exist, the fact is that bias does exist, is very strong, and is dangerously in favor of those who program them- the judicial system with which the prosecutors work -and is completely against the defendant.
This is not to say that all or even most people are innocent who are accused of crimes, but that in a court of law, the purpose of going to trial is to see if a person is actually the one who did something wrong. It has always been a pattern, but there is an increasing trend worldwide in nations that claim to be “civilized” to find people guilty of a crime before a fair trial, of which US popular opinion is one of the absolute best examples of this in that her people are notorious for encouraging judgment to the point of mob violence without a fair examination. The history of anti-immigration riots of the 19th and early 20th century, the violent pogroms led in the US against people of Irish, Italians, Polish, Afro-American, Japanese, and German heritage, or against people with public affiliations with religious groups such as the Catholic Faith, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs is evidence of this, and while it happens in all countries, it is wrong in the same way no matter where it goes.
Who needs mob violence or angry propaganda when a computer can be programmed to give a “favorable” verdict every time, and then have the cover of claiming that it is all being done “objectively”?
The “tyranny of the masses” has often and rightly been warned about. But as the world enters into a new period similar to that of the Industrial Revolution and the Information Revolution, the developments in AI and her applications will have major social consequences.
I have already warned that the use of AI in the economy will likely cause in the future massive job losses and such a shrinking of the job pool that, unless circumstances change, possibly the largest crisis of the 21st century will be an unemployment crisis that will have significant effects on the quality of life as well as further the current “hardening” of social classes, where there is increasingly a very wealthy class underneath an impoverished mass separated by a gravely and continually eroding middle class.
But the above is just economics. If AI “justice” is added to it, then the destruction of what is left of the ability to provide for oneself will be compounded by a series of overlords who use computers to accuse and incarcerate people for crimes, and without fundamental care for justice. It is part of the transformation of society into an open-air prison camp, except being a citizen is now a prisoner, and the wall are borders.
This has already happened to China, reminding that the current social credit system monitors people no differently than with cameras in a prison in combination with the difficult work situation as well as now AI justice.
The US is not that far away.
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