A New Materialist Reading of Artificial Intelligence in the Courtroom - CANCELLED

• In Event: Lightning Talk: Courts and the Law: Research, Challenges, and Innovations

Abstract

This paper develops a new materialist conceptualization for analyzing how courtrooms, and the legal discursive domains more generally, might be affected by artificial intelligence (AI). New materialist questions of AI’s impact argue language’s history is the cumulative trajectory that should first be considered. Hence, the role of courts is materially situated within the development of human civilization, as that matures to require technologies for determining “truth.” This role was first implicitly suggested by Emile Durkheim, when articulating the distinction between “pre-modern” and “modern” forms of punishment. Civilizing institutions allow language to gain the capacity to dissemble truth, so the guilt or innocence of an offender is an objective reality to be determined by the techniques of the court. Information processing constraints in maturing modernity—coupled with the growth of the prison industry—have changed this relationship of the courts to truth. Sentencing, plea bargains, etc are about processing cases within a legal reality, a discursive domain increasingly self-contained, independently operating from spaces where human interaction becomes labeled as offenses. AI will accelerate this processing capacity, extending the materiality of the police state, expanding the domains defined by this reality.

Author

• Christopher Shane Elliott, University of North Carolina Wilmington