File this one in the super scary bucket – Thanks.
I am going to try really hard on this one and not comment, not share my thoughts, just, well, report the news…..
How to Upgrade Judges with Machine Learning
In a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists and computer scientists trained an algorithm to predict whether defendants were a flight risk from their rap sheet and court records using data from hundreds of thousands of cases in New York City. When tested on over a hundred thousand more cases that it hadn’t seen before, the algorithm proved better at predicting what defendants will do after release than judges.
So, in short, they taught a computer, using old records on convicted criminals how to look at their rap sheet and feeding in what those convicted criminals ended up doing in their life when they were released or paroled.
Using this as their baseline, they then started to look at current cases. Since the computer can not feel or have an emotion in the case, it just looks at the rap sheet and makes a call based on its rule engine…. In this case, turns out that it knows better than judges.
Read the article if you want to know more.
Ok, ok, I said I would not comment, but just a quick thought.. I wonder if we are not going to see something like this come in as we saw in cricket… the never blinking third umpire…. The usual two are out there, but when it comes down to the close call, they call in the third, the TV camera… It makes the call frame by frame…. I wonder if we are not going to see this sneak into the courtroom like this?
Just a thought.
