A 'principled' artificial intelligence could improve justice

Nicolas Economou is the CEO of electronic discovery and information retrieval firm H5, a Senior Advisor to the AI Initiative of the Future Society at Harvard Kennedy School, and is an advocate of the application of scientific methods to electronic discovery. If asked whether entirely autonomous, artificially intelligent judges should ever have the power to send humans to jail, most of us would recoil in horror at the idea. Our answer would be a firm "Never!" But assume that AI judges, devoid of biases or prejudices, could make substantially more equitable, consistent and fair systemwide decisions than humans could, nearly eliminating errors and inequities. Would (should?) our answer be different?