I didn't state anything. That's a direct quote by the guy who runs what is, by leaps and bounds, the most advanced project applying AI to legal analysis. They'

I didn't state anything. That's a direct quote by the guy who runs what is, by leaps and bounds, the most advanced project applying AI to legal analysis. They're doing some incredible (and incredibly interesting) things, but even they don't see AI taking over courtrooms any time soon. Think about the two problems Professor Genesereth noted above (even in the context of the most laughably simple example imaginable). These problems aren't just of a different magnitude compared to the problems we are working on with AI right now--they're of a different character entirely. Do you know of any AI programs that can generate analogies to every possible thing/situation/event and choose the most "well-suited" among those alternatives based on a holistic, "all important things considered" balancing approach? Do you know of any AI programs that are able to rank human values/morals in a heirarchy, in a way that would be acceptable all (or even most) of us? Until the answer to those questions is "yes", you're not going to see AI sitting behind the bench in an American courtroom. A brief aside: the common law is used as a lazy evaluation strategy[0], whereby we can defer filling in the full content of any idea/word/phrase/whatever until it actually becomes a problem. So the legislature can pass a law "no pets allowed" instead of spelling out a full and comprehensive list of every imaginable item to be banned: "No Mesocricetus auratus [golden hamster], Mesocricetus brandti [Turkish hamster], Mesocricetus newtoni: [Romanian hamster]...and so on for the next 10,000 pages." AI could easily handle some of this filling in of content but not so much items like "reasonable search" or "malicious intent" or even, apparently, "vehicle." Those types of decisions often fall, not to logical deduction, but to induction from incomplete, conflicting and messy human theories about goodness and justice and truth. Just as most wouldn't outsource their decisions about who to love or what god to believe in, they're not going to let AIs make these types of decisions (assuming, of course, that AIs are even eventually capable of doing so--which remains an open question). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_evaluation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_evaluation