Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ross: Attorney built on top of IBM's Watson

poweredbyross.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 119 posts

Re: Ross: Attorney built on top of IBM's Watson

#81

Post by bediger4000 »

wodenokoto wrote: post #39
steveeq1 wrote: post #7

This is a good 80/20 solution. 80% of the value of the attorney for (less than) 20% of the effort/cost.

What people seem to misunderstand about steveeg1 comment is that a lot of time at an attorney office is spend sifting through old cases. Since lawyers bill in hours they either have to raise their hourly bill or lie about the hours spend in order to keep the final price tag the same.

Why should the final price tag remain the same? Free market economics says that if we introduce efficiencies, the price comes down, and/or fewer people produce the same output. In general (exception is music, as far as I can tell) that's the case. Other labor markets have suffered horrible, drastic shake-outs, why not Law?

Re: Ross: Attorney built on top of IBM's Watson

#83

Post by HCIdivision17 »

SixSigma wrote: post #66
lurcio wrote: post #51

Wowed 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!

This century-long decent into lesiure is what's really killing us. I wish I could remember back when cars were unaffordable, computers were unattainable, and hobby supplies were expensive specialist shops. I bet those were the days!

Re: Ross: Attorney built on top of IBM's Watson

#85

Post by abhijitr »

bsaul wrote: post #47

Does anyone know of in-depth articles that explain Watson internals (or even general such as what family of algorithms they're using) ? A friend of mine got to visit their R&D department a few years ago, and told me they basically explained nothing at all and remained on the marketing level. But there's got to be something somewhere, like previous research articles by the team's members, right ?

The team has published quite a few papers (albeit they are mostly behind paywalls). Here's a good overview: http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/23...

Re: Ross: Attorney built on top of IBM's Watson

#88

Post by mikecb »

joshuaheard wrote: post #87

Now that this "Attorney" can do legal research, I guess the next steps are to get it to marshal the relevant facts and evidence, analyze documents and information, interview witnesses, negotiate with the other side, and present a case to the jury.

Why do that? IBM becomes largest arbitrator ever, each side submits their case online, gets results in under a minute!

Re: Ross: Attorney built on top of IBM's Watson

#89

Post by jimbokun »

jakobegger wrote: post #40

I'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.

This seems similar to attempts to rewrite a complex code base to be simpler, more consistent, and easier to understand.

In practice, a lot of the quirky, wonky code is there to fix an actual bug that was encountered, and taking it out re-introduces the bug.

How do we know eliminating some of the complexities of current laws won't re-introduce some of the problems those complexities were trying to solve?

Post reply on HN