Should judges begin to feel fearful for their job security? According to a team of researchers, a new AI tool has been found to be highly accurate at predicting the outcome of European court cases. An AI judge that computes outcomes instead of a human jury has been the dystopian creation of science fiction writers for a number of years, but new developments suggest that they could be used in some capacity in future courts. According to University College London, a joint team of researchers from the US and the UK has developed a new AI method that is the first to predict the outcomes of a major international court, by automatically analysing case text using a machine-learning algorithm. The international court in this case is the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), and by churning the data obtained during these court cases from the cases brought by defendants and prosecutors, the AI was able to predict their outcomes 79pc of the time.