Regarding the recent Technology and Justice Congress, held at the CCK leadership, it is convenient to investigate some aspects that make the crossing - so necessary - of these worlds. Let's see.
This year, the European Commission for Efficiency in Justice, which works within the European Council, is turning precisely 20 years old and in that context it compiles the research and information published in two decades about, for example, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and all other kinds of technologies in justice, taking the search for efficiency as its axis.
In fact, this report is an update of what was presented in 2019, the year in which representatives from different countries presented the way in which they use algorithms in justice and debated the opportunities, challenges and dangers of the use of AI.
Some outstanding cases
In Austria, AI in the judicial field is used to analyze and classify correspondence information, both electronic and physical, to recognize names, addresses and other personal or sensitive data and then be able to anonymize the content that reaches the different courts.
They also use AI to determine and classify scanned documents by extracting data from textual information taken from analogue documents and they even recognize that they use AI for what in Argentina we would understand as preliminary preparatory investigation, that is, putting together a first version of the file in the criminal field.
Britain, for its part, uses natural language processing (NLP) and supervised machine learning. Data Mining work is carried out - assignment of classified values and meanings to data - including Speech Recognition - technologies that process language, from speech to text and vice versa - and image detection and classification.
Finally, France presented, at the event to which I refer, many doubts regarding what is called predictive justice, even if it is used in civil, commercial or other jurisdictions other than the criminal sphere - of course, the most controversial of all in terms of the use of AI, in accordance with the worldview to which we belong.
Even something quite curious: in that country they expressly prohibited jurimetrics, that is, the use of statistical information from the sentences of various courts in order to predict the decisions of the magistrates.
This specific ban on AI was due in part to the tremendous success of legal firms like Ravel Law, which can now model the decision-making tendencies of judicial decision-makers with relative ease, apparently upsetting French magistrates.
It is worth focusing on this point, because one of the dilemmas of using algorithms when developing judges' own tasks clearly appears.
There are interesting reflections that we can already raise in this talk; For example: what is jurisprudence and how we can understand it today.
Just as in the analog world jurisprudence has always been analyzed as the aggregate of judicial decisions, casuistry and the opinions of certain courts on certain problems, it turns out that technology now allows us to understand these statistics; extract true value from the aggregate of cases.
The doctrine, in fact, has always had a foothold in the analysis of decisions and arguments thanks to which the courts decide.
But one of the points that usually bothers the judicial corporation is something that has always been known in the legal world: the same courts, the same judges, when faced with the same problems, often resolve differently.
It has always been known that inconsistencies and dissimilar criteria can be found in judicial rulings. But it turns out that technology now allows us to expose them with complete clarity.
One of lime and one of sand
While the finding of patterns and the prediction of trends for cases in which decisions can be grouped sounds reasonable on the path towards efficiency in Justice (and especially if this allows us to avoid inconsistencies typical of human work), in other contexts the resistance to the intersection between technology and Justice takes on another depth.
In mid-July the Washington Post published an extensive and quite complete article titled something like the never-ending story in relation to the systematic attempt to have artificial intelligence predict crimes.
The article, all the time, revolves around the following idea: the background, the casuistry, what you call jurisprudence, is the past, and that past does not necessarily allow us to predict the future.
However, we know that if, faced with a problem, what we are trying to do is calculate the probabilities of its recurrence or worsening, we are basically going to use elements of empirical science, that is, statistical inference, which is nothing more than going to the past, looking for regularities, patterns, and being able to get an idea of what could happen.
That is what, for example, the job of a judge is about when he thinks about whether a criminal will reoffend or not. Justice forces us to think about recidivism, about crimes that cause harm to society, about behaviors that do not seem to improve with the punishment or decisions that the law provides.
Now well. Looking up, it does not seem sensible to try to stop the advance of applied science in almost any aspect of society.
Then, of course, depending on the latitude we analyze, the problems change. In Latin America, a good part of the effort is put into the processes, and not so much into judicial decisions.
Translated, we need to finish digitizing the bureaucracy to the point that, at least, we have a guarantee that everything that is done in the courts occurs through digital interfaces and there is no need, under any point of view, to leave that support.
In that understanding, the creation of the Federal Justice Bus presented on Monday, October 24, by the technical team of the Buenos Aires judiciary, is a clear advance: interoperability of computer systems in each province, digital seal with Blockchain cryptography of transactions between different organizations, security and capacity to meet electronic demand.
In the same sense, the Federal Justice Cloud was announced, created by the Federal Institute of Innovation, Technology and Justice (IFITeJ) chaired by Mario Adaro, member of the Mendoza Court and organizer of the Congress.
The opportunity for computer systems to have a technological infrastructure set up in ARSAT is what helps the most distant places with fewer resources to be able to run their programs and store information without paying for hardware (which is usually more expensive).
Likewise, Jeffrey Apperson, Vice President of International Relations of the National Center for State Courts of the United States, announced on Tuesday the 25th that they will cooperate with IFITeJ so that the software used by North American state courts is useful here.
Speak with clear words
However, it was Mario Pergolini who, with unmistakable style, fired into the microphone, around noon on Tuesday, questions that were left clattering on the floor of the CCK:
“How are they going to decide, in a few years, when it is their turn to buy technology from the two large groups that today are writing the code of the tools that are going to continue changing the world?”
He was referring, of course, to the development led, on the one hand, by the United States, with its patents and ways of conceiving systems (large companies managing an oligopolistic market, but with a certain democratic control by Congress and Justice inside and outside the United States) versus Chinese tanks like Tencent (Tik Tok), Alibaba, and Huawei.
All have a member of the Chinese Communist Party on their board. No one makes decisions without that approval.
The fight over AI between these two giants, which invest in applied science like no other, is so colossal that not even Europe as an economic community can overshadow them. Latin America, of course, even with examples that deserve to be recognized, “is not in the conversation” as Pergolini stated while looking into the eyes of members of the judicial branches of the entire country.
Regarding closing, Adaro preferred to refer to the value and human capacity in this country, which are, at this point, almost all we have to face the advanced technology that will radically change the way we understand Justice.
Minister Martín Soria promised more support. I hope it comes true.