Of course, it all comes down to Japanese sex robots in the end
posted at 8: 01 am on May 4,2017 by Jazz Shaw
Since we’ re apparently going to simply ignore the warnings of everyone from Stephen Hawking to the writers of the Terminator films and just embrace the advent of Artificial Intelligence, why not jump into it whole hog? There were a couple of bits of news which popped up this week which should give you a peek at what’s to come. Since most people who arrive at this site are interested in politics and government, you’ ll probably be thrilled to learn that you no longer have to wait around for nine old people in black robes to vote on the pressing issues of the day at the Supreme Court. Why bother with all of that when there’s an AI program which will tell you how the various justices will vote in advance? (Science Magazine)
A new study shows that computers can do a better job than experts at predicting Supreme Court decisions, even with less information… The new study draws on a much richer set of data to predict the behavior of any set of justices at any time. Researchers used the Supreme Court Database, which contains information on cases dating back to 1791, to build a general algorithm for predicting any justice’s vote at any time. They drew on 16 features of each vote, including the justice, the term, the issue, and the court of origin. Researchers also added other factors, such as whether oral arguments were heard. For each year from 1816 to 2015, the team created a machine-learning statistical model called a random forest. It looked at all prior years and found associations between case features and decision outcomes.
Okay, so it’s not 100% foolproof but it’s apparently better than humans. The report claims that a survey showed human legal experts only managed an accuracy rate of just over 60% when it comes to predicting SCOTUS decisions. (Come on, guys… we could flip a coin and come close to that.
