Matthew Kay introduces the robot lawyers of the future & recommends making friends with AI
Robot Sophia was granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia last year. If you haven’t heard of her (though should we even be using these pronouns?) Sophia is a humanoid robot, capable of not only delivering a speech, but, scarily, expressing opinions about how robots should be entitled to the same rights as humans. Whether a marketing ploy or not, Sophia is eerily human like and makes you wonder whether we are one step closer to creating sentient AI beings.
With this in mind, it’s particularly worrying that lecturers in The Times’ The Brief warned earlier this year that law schools are not teaching their students technology and the law, which is leaving them ‘dangerously exposed’ (The Brief , 25 January 2018). At a time when robots and AI systems are not only used in a variety of professions including the law, but also in the home as an assistant, it’s scary that law qualifications—the LPC and the proposed Solicitors Qualifying Examination —aren’t keeping up with technological developments.
Though
