Download The societal impact of artificial intelligence

The societal impact of
artificial intelligence
– What artificial intelligence can do in
the legal system and how
Anna Ronkainen
Chief Scientist, TrademarkNow
@ronkaine
AIHelsinki kickoff 2015-12-16
$200–300B USD/year!
A lot of difficult conversations to be
had about AI and society
-  will full employment be just a pipe dream – and
is it even desirable anymore
-  will income equality increase even more if
people are divided into those who tell
computers what to do and those who do what
computers tell them to do
-  will we still allow people to drive cars
-  will big data and omnipresent data gathering
make privacy a thing of the past
-  ...oh, and about those autonomous weapons...
Presuming we’re a more solutionoriented bunch in this room...
-  commercially AI is now where mobile was in
the ~1980s: the only way is up
-  probably no new N-word in sight, instead
many smaller Finnish companies doing quite
well (look around you)
-  AI potentially affecting 100–200k jobs in
Finland alone by 2025, and that tech has to
come from somewhere
What’s law got to do with it?
-  one of the very first application domains for AI
(1950s)
-  back in the day, law was at the forefront of the
automatic data processing revolution in general
(e.g. the great Pennsylvania Health Code
search-and-replace)
-  kind of a structural isomorphism between law
(as commands from the legislator to be carried
out by a judge or a citizen) and software
(commands from the programmer to be carried
out by the CPU), superficially correct but
misleading
In ye olden days (and still in Finland)
there were legal informatics
-  everything having to do with computers and
the law lumped into one discipline
-  software copyright, patents, privacy...
-  computational legal theory
-  theory of legal information
-  originally a 50/50 mix of people with a
(often practical) legal background and a CS
background, until the 1990s
More and less recent trends in AI &
law
-  1980s: expert systems (and logics)
-  1990s: ontologies (and logics)
-  2000s: argumentation (and logics)
-  2010s: outside interest/wake-up call from ediscovery (and logics)
-  a research community of ~500 people
-  main confs ICAIL and JURIX; AI&law journal
published by $pringer
A couple of real-life examples
(Ronkainen (2010): Mosong, a Fuzzy Logic Model
of Trade Mark Similarity)
What we do at TrademarkNow
-  trademark search: making sure your new
brand isn’t too close to earlier trademarks to
give your problems
-  trademark watch: alerting you about new
filings too close to your own marks to help
you take the necessary steps to protect them
(by filing an opposition against the new
mark)
-  globally, now >60 jurisdictions fully covered
How we do it
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data acquisition, import
inbound processing of individual marks, storage
search and watch UIs
likelihood of confusion algorithm
-  similarity of trademarks
-  phonetical, graphical, semantic, animal, mineral
-  similarity of goods and services
-  registrability (absolute grounds) analysis and other
useful information (e.g. dictionary results)
-  reporting
-  ...all using all kinds of AI techniques from GOFAI to
deep learning as appropriate
Why Finland needs more AI & law
-  fewest lawyers per capita in the OECD
-  court system struggles esp. with processing
times (many, many ECHR judgements)
-  most solutions have to be jurisdictionspecific (because the law is so different)
-  small country = small market, not all that
interesting for outsiders
Why AI & law needs Finland
-  the AI & law research community has been
rather insular (focus on just a couple of
special topics at a time, no new ideas
coming from the outside)
-  little focus on building systems with a
practical impact (or even validation, or even
doing work that can be validated)
-  ...and (of course) lots of amazeballs AI
people with mad skillz in Finland
Thank you!