US essayist and critic HL Mencken is little read now. Let’s just say that ‘wokery’ would not have escaped the sweep of his withering pen. But one of Mencken’s best-known satirical lines sprang to mind this week as I sat through the London International Disputes Week conference. ‘Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.’
Artificial intelligence is democratising legal action and civil society in deeply disconcerting ways. ‘It’s effectively free now, right?’, declared Sean West, AI guru and geopolitical commentator. But lawyers, regulators, commerce and government are only just beginning to understand the enormity of the consequences.
Some are positively dystopian. West spoke of a courtroom in China (admittedly not a democracy) where a robot will triage your case. You punch in the claim that you would like to file and it tells you whether you’re likely to win or lose. Then, if you want to continue, you click a button and the claim is filed.
According to West, however, your prospects are slim. The robot rarely predicts a winner, because the Chinese government does not consider legal disputes conducive to social harmony. So has the robot increased access to justice, or inhibited it? Or both? Can there be such a thing as justice in a state-capitalist dictatorship? Discuss.
Actually, forget Mencken. That robot sounds more like something Aldous Huxley or even Orwell would have dreamt up.
An explosion of what West nicely described as ‘legal spam’ is already beginning to materialise. This has the potential not only to drown the courts in a deluge of dockets but also to paralyse commerce and even legislatures. A general counsel who last year had 1,000 employment cases to deal with, this year fielded 10,000. Corporate lobbyists and campaigners are moving to scupper government policies by bombarding consultations with AI-generated responses that legislators are legally bound to consider. We already know regulators – including the SRA – are buckling under the weight of AI-generated complaints.
And what of jobs? Most people have stopped pretending that AI isn’t going to sweep them away by the millions. West, intriguingly, predicts a ‘white-collar backlash’ within the next decade, when ‘professionals like lawyers and consultants are suddenly confronted by their weaker prospects’.
Man the barricades.
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