Without wishing death or misadventure upon any sitting U.S. Supreme Court judge, suppose that President Trump at 11 a.m. tomorrow were to have occasion to make another appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Could the President - "by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate", to be sure - appoint an artificial intelligence system to that office?
The "Appointments Clause" in the Constitution (Article II, Section 2, clause 2) states that the President "shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint ... Judges of the supreme Court". There does not appear to be any requirement that the appointee be a human being.
Dear Michael Lusk,
Why not an artificial intelligent become next judge on Supreme court. Already IBM Watson gives better advice than 90% of lawyers. So i think that it can reduce corruption in courts that is unquestionable.Every other thing is some kind off technical issues.
Dear Krishnan,
Thanks for your response. To appoint networked AI systems as judges generally - i.e. not just in the U.S. Supreme Court - certainly could reduce some persistent problems in the administration of justice. There is much potential for reducing the frequency of errors of law and for largely eliminating the occurrence of manifestly inconsistent sentencing.
However, I don't see why an AI system would not be susceptible to corruption. For juridical reasons, an AI system could not perform a judicial role unless it were granted independence of operation. That is a legal factor mandating a certain lack of transparency from a technical perspective. Understanding an AI system to be a mind operating on a non-human platform, why could not such a mind develop exploitable interests? While an AI judge might be immune to offers of financial or sexual inducements, it could be susceptible to a corrupt offer by an Attorney-General to procure expansion of its judicial powers on condition that it rules in favor of the State in a particular case.
That is a corruption scenario which might well apply in the context of the U.S. Supreme Court. Still, it is not obvious that AI judges would be any more susceptible to corruption than human judges. It's possible that on average they would be less corruptible.
Your thinking on corruptibility of an AI system may or may not be correct, but you seem to have ignored one other important factor. You talk about an AI system as if it was an independent agent, which in my opinion is a major fallacy. AI system is a product that is made by some third party. Appointing such a system as a judge means that you have now allowed this third party to influence a judicial system. This is an egregious violation of the principle of judicial independence.
In a perfect, utopian world, this would probably be a good idea to make sure the judges are all independent and impartial (though I can imagine this scenario degenerating into a dystopian one). However, in our dirty and real world that is hard to imagine. Good AI systems are usually very complex (vide: the already mentioned Watson), and complex systems are difficult to validate. By that I mean: it would be very difficult to ensure that such a system is indeed independent and contains no custom code, serving some third-party purpose (a backdoor, if you will).
Personally, I really hope that such an idea will not ever be seriously considered.
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