China unveils digital courts with AI judges and verdicts via apps
China has developed mobile courts with artificial-intelligence judges and verdicts delivered through chat apps aiming to deal with backlogs in cases. Litigants appear by video chats as AI judge with avatar hears the cases.
The country is urging digitization to streamline case-handling within its court system using cyberspace technologies such as blockchain and cloud computing, according to the Supreme People's Court in a policy paper.
The paper was released in the first week of December as judicial authorities provided journalists a sneak peek of the country's first cyber court which was established in 2017 in Hangzhou city.
Social media platform WeChat has reportedly handled over three million legal cases already or other judicial procedures since its launch in March.
In a demonstration, authorities presented how the Hangzhou Internet Court works, featuring an online interface with the AI judge that prompts the hearing.
Cases handled in the digital court include online trade disputes, copyright cases, and e-commerce product liability claims.
Litigants can register civil complaints online and log on for hearing.
Such simple functions can help ease the burden on human justices who monitor proceedings and make the significant rulings in each case.
Concluding cases "at a faster speed is a kind of justice because justice delayed is justice denied," Hangzhou Internet Court Vice President Ni Defeng said.
The use of blockchain technology was useful in helping to streamline and create clearer records of the legal process, Ni added.
A total of 118 764 cases have been accepted, and 88 401 were concluded, according to the Supreme People's Court. The mobile court option on WeChat enables users to complete case-related actions, without having to appear in the court physically.
It has been launched in 12 provinces and regions.
Featured image credit: Geralt/Pixabay @louisviol/Unsplash
The general social goal seems to be: get people to do what they do well (beneficial to society) and get them to avoid what they do poorly (detrimental to society).
Humanity faces the same problem with AI. What will it do well and what poorly?
Fake video can be programmed to project both the moving image and the modulated voice of famous people and make them speak any script you write. The artificial video cannot be told apart from a real recording of the same person. This new algorithm is lethal for contemporary media credibility.
Industrial, digital, virtual, artificial intelligence, etc., technologies occupy our lives in winner-take-all, painful and turbulent waves. If money can be made (or often not) with a new corporate technology, then it swallows up our life (hourly labor, cigarettes, pesticides, smart phones, carbon fuels).
Each technology would be kept within the bounds of its excellence. The rest of our life could be more analog, natural, and person-to-person rather than digital, virtual, AI; all of them limited to their bounds of excellence.
We will get to live in three worlds: the real one lived out in person as natural, truthful, bio and honest as we can make it based on local, largely analog and hands-on technologies; many virtual ones as varied, hallucinatory and unrealistic as we like as long as not acted out seriously in the physical world; and a shadow world of fake news, conspiracy theory and political extremism broadcast non-stop from recreational fiction channels certified untrue, artificial and detrimental to society if taken seriously. Insofar possible, politics should be conducted in person by newspaper, paper ballots and tiers of representatives elected by universal suffrage. The membranes between these worlds need not be water tight, just generally selective and preferential for their central traits.
Of course, each discipline in the “real” world would perfect its performance with state-ot-the-art technology, as long as those worlds were lived in “separately” to a certain extent, according to each person’s taste. High technology in professional and hobby settings, for example, while basic, more natural (older) technologies in interpersonal, faith, teaching, artistic and other settings.
Separate these spheres of interest on a popular basis or watch them tear each other apart if mixed promiscuously, arbitrarily and power-based as they are today.