Next step: Engineer built on top of IBM's Watson. Next next step: Engineer built on top of IBM's Watson to replace Watson development team. :)
Did anyone say Singularity? :)
Ross: Attorney built on top of IBM's Watson
61–70 of 119 posts
Re: Ross: Attorney built on top of IBM's Watson
#62This might be a way to help overburdened court appointed defense attorneys better represent their clients (as well as speed up the overburdened judicial system).
I'd like to think of this as comparable to CAD for architects, except attorneys have never had any serious domain-focused assistive software, beyond word processing. Maybe some have, but it's not a well-known category that I've been able to see.
Re: Ross: Attorney built on top of IBM's Watson
#63Re: Ross: Attorney built on top of IBM's Watson
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, it's a reflection of reality and human values, both of which which happen to be very complex, nuanced, and have plenty of edge cases for any rule we might try to dream up.
I think it's a reflection of an uneducated society that cannot apply common sense or the Golden Rule. Everything has to be specified in extreme detail.
Common sense is sufficient for most things. The problem with law is that what gets to court are the weird edge cases that aren't covered by common sense.
Often by the time something reaches the court, there is no possible outcome that provides justice for all, and the court instead has to determine which of the parties to screw the least.
Re: Ross: Attorney built on top of IBM's Watson
#65I'm impressed, and I'd love to see it in action. But I'm also worried that this is going in the wrong direction. If the law is getting too complex for humans to handle, the solution is not to create supercomputers that help us. The solution should be to simplify the law.
In theory that would be great, and it's been attempted multiple times throughout history - the law has pretty much always been too complex.
The problem is that much (although admittedly not all) of the complexity in the law is a result of attempts to clarify and provide consistency to the nuance and obscure edge cases that occur in real life. Removing that nuance from codified law results in it being even more down to a judge's individual interpretation than it is today, meaning individuals would be even less clear on where they stand than they do now.
If a computer could accurately interpret the law, and that computer was freely available to everyone, I think we'd all be in a far better position.
Re: Ross: Attorney built on top of IBM's Watson
#66Wowed by the engineering brilliance. Ambivalent about the social cost-benefit. Creative destruction indeed (for the lower and middle orders, anyway). "First it came for the factory workers,...and then the medics and lawyers..."
It won't be satisfied until there's no work left to do, then how will we spend our time!
Re: Ross: Attorney built on top of IBM's Watson
#67Couple of my friends that work for IBM told me that it still needs a lot of work because researchers that take blind tests can almost always tell apart the cold, inhuman responses that are devoid of any human decency from the responses generated by the computer.
I've thought the same about some human attorneys, too.
Re: Ross: Attorney built on top of IBM's Watson
#68Wowed by the engineering brilliance. Ambivalent about the social cost-benefit. Creative destruction indeed (for the lower and middle orders, anyway). "First it came for the factory workers,...and then the medics and lawyers..."
It won't be satisfied until there's no work left to do, then how will we spend our time!
Inventing new work for Watson
Re: Ross: Attorney built on top of IBM's Watson
#69Why is this only offered to lawyers and legal professionals? I have had countless scenarios where I just want to look up something regarding the laws surrounding a topic but get lost looking for accurate legal information... This seems like a perfect solution for that use case, no?
No. It's more like StackOverflow. You wouldn't send a non-programmer there for basic questions, it's for people who work in the field looking for specific answers.
Re: Ross: Attorney built on top of IBM's Watson
#70This might be a way to help overburdened court appointed defense attorneys better represent their clients (as well as speed up the overburdened judicial system).
I'd like to think of this as comparable to CAD for architects, except attorneys have never had any serious domain-focused assistive software, beyond word processing. Maybe some have, but it's not a well-known category that I've been able to see.
There are some packages for very specific sub-fields, things like Collection Master and such but I'm not aware of anything generic enough to cover the field of 'law'.