Notes: AI and Law
See Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 6 See Ray
Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking
Press, 2005).
• AI is the ability to achieve an unlimited range of goals, including in situations of
uncertainty or vagueness. This encompasses many of the attributes we think of as
intelligence in humans. General AI does not exist yet
• The idea of creating intelligent life from inanimate materials goes back much further
than the creation of humans. The Sumerian creation stories speak of a servant for the
Gods being created from clay and blood. In literature and the arts, the idea of
technology being used to create sentient assistants for humans or Gods has been
around for thousands of years. In Jewish folklore, there is a story of a rabbi creating a
Golem to defend his ghetto.
• The idea of AI as only meaning humanoid robots which look, sound and think like us,
is mis- taken. Such conceptions of AI make its advent appear to be distant, given that
no technology at present comes remotely close to this.
Defining AI
• The word artificial intelligence is a bit of a mess because there is little agreement
about what intelligence is. - The authors of Stanford University’s One Hundred Year
Study on Artificial Intelligence state: Curiously, the lack of a precise, universally
accepted definition of AI proba- bly has helped the field to grow, blossom, and
advance at an ever-accelerat- ing pace. Practitioners, researchers, and
developers of AI are instead guided by a rough sense of direction and an
imperative to “get on with it”. Citation: Jerry Kaplan, Artificial Intelligence:
What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1.
Justice Potter Stewart of the US Supreme Court once said that he could not define
hardcore pornography “But I know it when I see it”
• Lon L. Fuller set out eight formal requirements for a legal system to satisfy certain
basic moral norms, including that laws should be promulgated so that citizens know
the standards to which they are being held.- Lon L. Fuller, The Morality of Law
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969)
• In a seminal paper, Alan Turing asked whether machines could think. In the exercise,
a human invigilator must try to identify which of the two players is a man pretending
to be a woman. Turing proposed a version of the Imitation Game in which the
machine takes the place of the human player. Modern versions of the game ask human
judges to decide if the computer is human. - Yuval Harari has offered the
interesting explanation that the form of Turing’s Imitation Game resulted in
part from Turing’s own need to suppress his homosexuality, to fool society and
the authorities into thinking he was something that he was not. The focus on
gender and subterfuge in the first iteration of the test is, perhaps, not accidental.
Yuval Harari, Homo Deus (London: Harvill Secker, 2016), 120.
“AI is technology with the ability to perform tasks that would otherwise require human
intelligence”- This definition is adapted from that used by the UK Department for
Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Industrial Strategy: Building a Britain Fit for
the Future (November 2017), 37,
See Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 6 See Ray
Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking
Press, 2005).
• AI is the ability to achieve an unlimited range of goals, including in situations of
uncertainty or vagueness. This encompasses many of the attributes we think of as
intelligence in humans. General AI does not exist yet
• The idea of creating intelligent life from inanimate materials goes back much further
than the creation of humans. The Sumerian creation stories speak of a servant for the
Gods being created from clay and blood. In literature and the arts, the idea of
technology being used to create sentient assistants for humans or Gods has been
around for thousands of years. In Jewish folklore, there is a story of a rabbi creating a
Golem to defend his ghetto.
• The idea of AI as only meaning humanoid robots which look, sound and think like us,
is mis- taken. Such conceptions of AI make its advent appear to be distant, given that
no technology at present comes remotely close to this.
Defining AI
• The word artificial intelligence is a bit of a mess because there is little agreement
about what intelligence is. - The authors of Stanford University’s One Hundred Year
Study on Artificial Intelligence state: Curiously, the lack of a precise, universally
accepted definition of AI proba- bly has helped the field to grow, blossom, and
advance at an ever-accelerat- ing pace. Practitioners, researchers, and
developers of AI are instead guided by a rough sense of direction and an
imperative to “get on with it”. Citation: Jerry Kaplan, Artificial Intelligence:
What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1.
Justice Potter Stewart of the US Supreme Court once said that he could not define
hardcore pornography “But I know it when I see it”
• Lon L. Fuller set out eight formal requirements for a legal system to satisfy certain
basic moral norms, including that laws should be promulgated so that citizens know
the standards to which they are being held.- Lon L. Fuller, The Morality of Law
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969)
• In a seminal paper, Alan Turing asked whether machines could think. In the exercise,
a human invigilator must try to identify which of the two players is a man pretending
to be a woman. Turing proposed a version of the Imitation Game in which the
machine takes the place of the human player. Modern versions of the game ask human
judges to decide if the computer is human. - Yuval Harari has offered the
interesting explanation that the form of Turing’s Imitation Game resulted in
part from Turing’s own need to suppress his homosexuality, to fool society and
the authorities into thinking he was something that he was not. The focus on
gender and subterfuge in the first iteration of the test is, perhaps, not accidental.
Yuval Harari, Homo Deus (London: Harvill Secker, 2016), 120.
“AI is technology with the ability to perform tasks that would otherwise require human
intelligence”- This definition is adapted from that used by the UK Department for
Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Industrial Strategy: Building a Britain Fit for
the Future (November 2017), 37,
