IBA 2023: 'Outsource all small claims to artificial intelligence,' world-renowned futurologist urges

Small claims should be disposed of by artificial intelligence applications talking to each other without human intervention, one of the world’s leading AI futurologists told the IBA conference in Paris on Tuesday. A judge may be required to ‘rubber-stamp’ outcomes, but Zack Kass believes even this may be unnecessary.

AI is unbiased while judges sometimes ‘get out of bed on the wrong side’ in the morning, he said.

California-based Kass was most recently head of GTM (go-to-market) at OpenAI.

‘I do not want to be found guilty of a meaningful crime by AI represented by AI,’ he told a session chaired by Ian Jeffery, chief executive of the Law Society of England and Wales. ‘But I really want my attorney to use AI. I think that we should all expect that we will need to be subjected to this supreme intelligence - even if it doesn’t stand up in front of a courtroom and make meaningful arguments.

‘The tort law problem is so meaningful [in the US] and it is smothering courts that should be focused on other, more pressing issues. We should probably outsource most small claims to AI for issues smaller than $1,000 [£820] - that’s my belief.’

Kass also issued an urgent wake-up call to lawyers unprepared for ‘the most profound industrial revolution in human history’. He believes artificial general intelligence – the moment when AI becomes ‘so effective and smart that it will help itself invent novel scientific advancements’ - could arrive by 2028 and will definitely arrive by 2030.

The ramifications will be startling: ‘We are making advancements in olfactory, in robotics, in touch, in video and 3D, that you will start to see play out over the next two years in really profound commercial ways.

‘We’re going to cure cancer, we’re going to cure Alzheimer’s. We’re going to solve the fusion problem. We’re probably going to solve interstellar travel. If you want to know what it might look like, just imagine putting [all the] best oncology researchers you can imagine in a room for 100 years.

‘The things that we hold as luxuries today, high quality education and primary care doctors, for example, become accessible to everyone. And the cost of goods and services plummets.’

Lawyers will be encouraged by Kass’s upbeat prediction that there will be no ‘job displacement’. But professionals will find their work changes beyond recognition.

‘Every industrial revolution sees a 50% net growth in jobs on the other side. We’re not facing a job displacement crisis - we’re facing an identity displacement crisis. We are facing a reality where people, a lot of people in this room, will wake up day after day realising that their job is changing radically. You won’t actually be able to reconcile why you went to school for eight years.’

Kass urged law firms which have not vetted the AI strategies of their technology vendors to their own satisfaction to change vendors. But what lawyers must do above all is actually use the technology that is already there, such as ChatGPT4, to substantiate its benefits to political decision-makers. 'You are very influential people who have the opportunity to determine practical applications of this technology,' he said.

The danger, he stressed, is over-regulation: ‘I am pro-regulation, but overbearing policy will push progress back materially in very harmful ways. And you don’t need to look any further than nuclear to wonder what that might look like.’

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