Can A.I. be fair judge in court? Estonia thinks so...
CAN AI BE A FAIR JUDGE IN COURT? ESTONIA THINKS SO
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AUTHOR: ERIC NIILER03.25.19 07:00 AM
"We
want the government to be as lean as possible," says the wiry,
bespectacled Velsberg, an Estonian who is writing his PhD thesis at
Sweden’s Umeå University on how to use AI in government services. Estonia's
government hired Velsberg last August to run a new project to introduce AI into
various ministries to streamline services offered to residents.
Deploying AI is crucial, he says. “Some people worry that if we
lower the number of civil employees, the quality of service will suffer. But
the AI agent will help us." About 22 percent of Estonians work for the government;
that’s about average for European countries, but higher than the 18 percent
rate in the US.
Siim Sikkut, Estonia’s chief information officer, began
piloting several AI-based projects at agencies in 2017, before hiring Velsberg
last year. Velsberg says Estonia has deployed AI or machine learning in 13
places where an algorithm has replaced government workers.
For example, inspectors no longer check on farmers who receive
government subsidies to cut their hay fields each summer. Satellite images
taken by the European Space Agency each week from May to October are fed into a deep-learning algorithm originally developed by
the Tartu Observatory. The images are overlaid onto a map of fields where
farmers receive the hay-cutting subsidies to prevent them from turning forests
over time.
The algorithm assesses each pixel in
the images, determining if the patch of the field has been cut or not. Cattle
grazing or partial cutting can throw off the image processing; in those cases,
an inspector still drives out to check. Two weeks before the mowing deadline,
the automated system notifies farmers via text or email that includes a link to
the satellite image of their field. The system saved $1.2 million in its first
year because inspectors made fewer site visits and focused on other enforcement
actions, according to Velsberg.
In another application, resumes of
laid-off workers are fed into a machine learning system that matches their
skills with employers. About 72 percent of workers who gain a new job through
the system are still on the job after six months, up from 58 percent before the
computer-matching system was deployed. In a third case, children born in
Estonia are automatically enrolled in local schools at birth, so parents don't
have to sign up on waiting lists or call school administrators. That’s because
hospital records are automatically shared with local schools. The system
doesn’t truly require AI, but it shows how automated services are expanding.
In the most ambitious project to
date, the Estonian Ministry of Justice has asked Velsberg and his team to
design a “robot judge” that could adjudicate small claims disputes of less than
€7,000 (about $8,000). Officials hope the system can clear a backlog of cases
for judges and court clerks.
The project is in its early phases
and will likely start later this year with a pilot focusing on contract
disputes. In concept, the two parties will upload documents and other relevant
information, and the AI will issue a decision that can be appealed to a human
judge. Many details are still to be worked out. Velsberg says the system might
have to be adjusted after feedback from lawyers and judges.
Estonia’s effort isn’t the first to mix AI and the law, though it
may be the first to give an algorithm decision-making authority. In the US,
algorithms help recommend criminal sentences in some states. The UK-based DoNotPay AI-driven chatbot overturned 160,000
parking tickets in London and New York a few years ago.
A Tallinn-based law firm, Eesti Oigusbüroo, provides free legal aid through a
chatbot and generates simple legal documents to send to collection agencies. It
plans to expand its “Hugo-AI” legal aid service matching clients and lawyers to
Warsaw and Los Angeles by the end of the year, said CEO Artur Fjodorov.
The idea of a robot judge might work in Estonia partly because its
1.3 million residents already use a national ID card and are used to an online menu of services such as e-voting and
digital tax filing.
Government databases connect with each other through something
called the X-road, a digital infrastructure that makes data sharing easier.
Estonian residents can also check who has been accessing their information by
logging into a government digital portal.
Estonia’s well-documented move to digital government services
hasn’t been without at least one glitch. Outside experts revealed a vulnerability in Estonia's ID system in 2017 that
led to some embarrassment; it was fixed and the ID cards replaced. But
government officials say the country hasn't had a major data breach or theft
since it began its digital drive in the early 2000s. In 2016, more than two-thirds of Estonian adults filed
government forms on the internet, almost twice the European average.
“The really private and confidential
things are not in the hands of government, but banks and telecoms,” says Tanel
Tammet, a professor of computer science at Tallinn University of Technology.
Tammet is a member of an Estonian government AI task force that will report its
findings in May and suggest an additional 35 AI-related demonstration projects
by 2020.
Stanford University’s David Engstrom, an expert in digital governance, says
Estonian citizens might trust the government's use of their digital data today,
but things might change if one of the new AI-based decision-making systems goes
awry.
In the US, agencies such as the
Social Security Administration are using AI and machine learning algorithms to
speed sorting and processing, while the EPA is using AI to determine which factories
should be checked for pollution violations. But a coordinated AI effort across
the federal government has gone slowly, Engstrom says, mainly because federal
databases in each agency are different and aren’t easily shared with other
agencies.
“We’re not
there yet,” he said.
Engstrom and a team of law school and computer science students at
Stanford are studying how AI can be better used in US
government agencies. They will soon report their findings to the Administrative
Conference of the United States, an independent federal agency charged with
recommending improvements to administrative processes.
He doesn’t see a AI-driven
robo-judge coming to US courtrooms anytime soon. The US has no national ID
system and many Americans have an innate fear of Big Government. “We have due
process in the Constitution and that has something to say about fully automated
decision making by a government agency,” Engstrom said. “Even with a human
appeal, there could be a constraint.”
Still,
Engstrom foresees a time when AI-driven legal assistants might be presenting
judges with case law, precedents, and the background needed to make a decision.
“The promise of an AI approach is you get more consistency than we currently
have,” he said. “And maybe an AI driven system that is more accurate than human
decision making system.”
The flip side is that an AI is only
as good as the programming that goes into it. The sentencing algorithms, for
example, have been criticized as biased against blacks.
"You also worry about
automation bias," Engstrom says. As the machines make more decisions,
humans are less likely to inject their own expertise into a system, he says.
"That’s one of these creeping things that privacy advocates and good government
advocates worry about when the government digitizes in this way."
For now, though, Estonian officials like the idea of an AI robot
solving simple disputes, leaving more time for human judges and lawyers to
solve tougher problems. Deploying more AI in government services "will
allow us to specialize in something the machines can never do,” President Kersti Kaljulaid noted at the recent North Star AI
conference in Tallinn. “I want to specialize in being a warm compassionate
human being. For that we need the AI to be safe, and demonstrably safe."
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