Goto

Collaborating Authors

 legal value


Article: BeSpacific, "The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Law: Basic Questions"

#artificialintelligence

As AI becomes increasingly integrated within the legal system, how can society ensure that core legal values are preserved? Among the most important of these legal values are: equal treatment under the law; public, unbiased, and independent adjudication of legal disputes; justification and explanation for legal outcomes; outcomes based upon law, principle, and facts rather than social status or power; outcomes premised upon reasonable, and socially justifiable grounds; the ability to appeal decisions and seek independent review; procedural fairness and due process; fairness in design and application of the law; public promulgation of laws; transparency in legal substance and process; adequate access to justice for all; integrity and honesty in creation and application of law; and judicial, legislative, and administrative efficiency. The use of AI in law may diminish or enhance how these values are actually expressed within the legal system or alter their balance relative to one another. This chapter surveys some of the most important ethical topics involving the use of AI within the legal system itself (but not its use within society more broadly) and examines how central legal values might unintentionally (or intentionally) change with increased use of AI in law."


Checking a Knowledge-Based System for Consistency and Completeness

AI Magazine

We describe a computer program that implements an algorithm to verify the consistency and completeness of knowledge bases built for the Lockheed expert system (LES) shell. The algorithms described here are not specific to this particular shell and can be applied to many rule-based systems. The computer program, which we call CHECK, combines logical principles as well as specific information about the knowledge representation formalism of LES. The program checks both goal-driven and data-driven rules. CHECK identifies inconsistencies in the knowledge base by looking for redundant rules, conflicting rules, subsumed rules, unnecessary IF conditions, and circular rule chains. Checking for completeness is done by looking for unreferenced attribute values, illegal attribute values, dead-end IF conditions, dead-end goals and unreachable conclusions. These conditions can be used to suggest missing rules and gaps in the knowledge base. The program also generates a chart that shows the dependencies among the rules. CHECK can help the knowledge engineer detect many programming errors even before the knowledge base testing phase. It also helps detect gaps in the knowledge base testing phase. It also helps detect gaps in the knowledge base that the knowledge engineer and the expert have overlooked. A wide variety of knowledge bases have been analyzed using CHECK.