In the law, sometimes there is a need to craft a somewhat fictional aspect for purposes of allowing the wheels of justice to spin freely and not get unduly gummed up. That's where legal fiction can handily come to play. Per the definition of the Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute (LII), a legal fiction is formally denoted as "an assumption and acceptance of something as fact by a court, although it might not be, so as to allow a rule to operate or be applied in a manner that differs from its original purpose while leaving the letter of the law unchanged." This is done ostensibly in the pursuit of justice, but for which can also be more modestly employed in the interests of convenience or for other jurisprudential benefits. I am reminding you about the nature of legal fiction to provide a bit of a potential surprise or some might say a mind-bending bombshell about a loosely proposed legal fiction regarding AI. Some experts suggest that we might need to concoct a legal fiction associated with ascribing a form of legal personhood to AI systems.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is gradually and inexorably entering into the legal profession. There is the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP), which we already experience in everyday ordinary interaction with Alexa and Siri and has been increasingly added into various LegalTech systems such as used for contract management, e-Discovery, and the like. Another avenue of AI consists of Machine Learning and Deep Learning. These computational pattern matching techniques are being used to predict court rulings and are also employed to ferret out prior relevant cases amongst a large-scale corpus of online court records. One of the most fascinating and likely law-disruptive AI technologies involves AI-based legal reasoning systems. The notion is that the AI simulates the legal argumentation precepts of human attorneys and essentially carries out a limited form of legal reasoning. Initially, these AI-based legal reasoners would be used as an aid for lawyers and jurists seeking to craft legal arguments. In this semi-autonomous mode, the AI works hand-in-hand with the human legal expert and they jointly establish a robust legal argument or legal posture. Some assert that this capability by the AI will inevitably be further advanced and we will have available fully autonomous AI-based legal reasoning systems that can act in lieu of needing any human legal guidance.

Some would contend that there is the law and then there is everything else. You've likely heard that well-worn line before. It is certainly eye-catching and memorable. What makes the catchphrase especially interesting is that somewhere in that morass is so-called soft law, sitting somewhat in a no man's zone. Yes, there is a nebulous grey area that is not quite a law and yet oftentimes provides a law-like shaping and tonal directive toward what we can do, including whether our actions are seemingly lawful or ostensibly could veer into becoming unlawful.

Do you know where you are? I don't mean that you perhaps know that you are at a particular street address or sitting in your favorite chair at home, but instead, I am referring to the aspect that you spatially know where you are. Via your senses and your mind, you might realize that you are ten feet away from a nearby TV and that you are five feet away from the nearest window. As you sit inside a room, your mind has an abstract model that keeps track of where you are and where other nearby objects reside. On top of that realization, your mind also knows that the room is within a building, the building is within a neighborhood of buildings, and the neighborhood is within a city, which is within a county, and within a state, and within a country, etc. Imagine using something like a mental version of Google Earth and having your mind be able to zoom in and zoom outward, quickly imagining your position from a faraway location and at the same time being able to get close-in and know exactly where your feet are placed and your immediate and within reach surroundings.

There must be a better way, some lament. It is taking too long, some say, and we need to try a different alternative. What are those comments referring to? They are referring to the efforts underway for the development of AI-based self-driving driverless autonomous cars. There are currently billions upon billions of dollars being expended towards trying to design, develop, build, and field a true self-driving car.

Dr. Lance B. Eliot is a world-renowned expert on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and especially Autonomous Vehicles (AV). As a seasoned executive and high-tech entrepreneur, he combines practical industry experience with deep academic research to provide innovative insights about the present and future of AI and ML technologies and applications. Formerly a professor at USC and UCLA, and head of a pioneering AI lab, he frequently speaks at major AI industry events. Author of over 30 books, 300 articles, and 200 podcasts, he has made appearances on media outlets such as CNN and co-hosted the popular radio show Technotrends. His particular specialty in AI is Autonomous Vehicles and advances in self-driving driverless cars.