The fact that the most elite judges in the land, those of the Supreme Court, disagree so extremely and so routinely really says a lot about the farcical nature of the judicial system. Ideally, these people would be selected for their ice-cold and unbiased skills in interpreting the law, and the judgments would be unanimous so frequently that a dissent would be shocking news.
Law is complicated, especially the requirement that existing law be combined with stare decisis. It's easy to see how an LLM could dog-walk a human judge if a judgement is purely a matter of executing a set of logical rules.
If LLMs are capable of performing this feat, frankly I think it would be appropriate to think about putting the human law interpreters out to pasture. However, for those who are skeptical of throwing LLMs at everything (and I'm definitely one of these): this will most definitely be the thing that triggers the Butlerian Jihad. An actual unbiased legal system would be an unaccptable threat to the privileges of the ruling class.
The law isn't a series of "if... then..." statements. It's a collection of vagueries and categorizations that are wholly open to interpretation of when and who they apply to. Add to that, sometimes they are in conflict with each other.
It's not currently, but if we were able to use AI to generate laws in an objective and logically sound way based on general principles like "don't harm others or their property", we'd be much better off.
> if we were able to use AI to generate laws in an objective and logically sound way ... we'd be much better off.
A major role of judges is specifically to not do that because there are circumstances that will not have been thought of at the time of a law being written, new laws will be written that interact in unforeseen ways with existing laws and/or common views on justice can change over time.
It may be technically illegal to destroy a person's property but no judge is going to convict someone who breaks down a person's front door because they heard someone crying for help inside. That's a simple example but there would have to be enumerable exceptions to every single law for an objective/logical AI to do justice.
Rather than try to enumerate the enumerable, we let judges judge.
> It may be technically illegal to destroy a person's property but no judge is going to convict someone who breaks down a person's front door because they heard someone crying for help inside.
> we let judges judge.
The role of a judge is to interpret and apply the law, including applying existing legal standards and precedents. They are referees in the adversarial judicial system and it is unethical legal malpractice for them to apply their discretion in places where the law does not allow for it. Your hypothetical situation doesn't help your argument: if the judge in question is not applying the law as it is written and as the precedents dictate, they are violating their oath.
Law is complicated, especially the requirement that existing law be combined with stare decisis. It's easy to see how an LLM could dog-walk a human judge if a judgement is purely a matter of executing a set of logical rules.
If LLMs are capable of performing this feat, frankly I think it would be appropriate to think about putting the human law interpreters out to pasture. However, for those who are skeptical of throwing LLMs at everything (and I'm definitely one of these): this will most definitely be the thing that triggers the Butlerian Jihad. An actual unbiased legal system would be an unaccptable threat to the privileges of the ruling class.