The societal impact of artificial intelligence – What artificial intelligence can do in the legal system and how

Anna Ronkainen Chief Scientist, TrademarkNow @ronkaine AIHelsinki kickoff 2015-12-16

$200–300B USD/year!

A lot of difficult conversations to be had about AI and society -  will full employment be just a pipe dream – and

is it even desirable anymore -  will income equality increase even more if

people are divided into those who tell computers what to do and those who do what computers tell them to do

-  will we still allow people to drive cars -  will big data and omnipresent data gathering

make privacy a thing of the past -  ...oh, and about those autonomous weapons...

Presuming we’re a more solution-oriented bunch in this room... -  commercially AI is now where mobile was in

the ~1980s: the only way is up -  probably no new N-word in sight, instead

many smaller Finnish companies doing quite well (look around you)

- AI potentially affecting 100–200k jobs in Finland alone by 2025, and that tech has to come from somewhere

What’s law got to do with it? -  one of the very first application domains for AI

(1950s) -  back in the day, law was at the forefront of the

automatic data processing revolution in general (e.g. the great Pennsylvania Health Code search-and-replace)

-  kind of a structural isomorphism between law (as commands from the legislator to be carried out by a judge or a citizen) and software (commands from the programmer to be carried out by the CPU), superficially correct but misleading

In ye olden days (and still in Finland) there were legal informatics -  everything having to do with computers and

the law lumped into one discipline -  software copyright, patents, privacy... -  computational legal theory -  theory of legal information

-  originally a 50/50 mix of people with a (often practical) legal background and a CS background, until the 1990s

More and less recent trends in AI & law -  1980s: expert systems (and logics) -  1990s: ontologies (and logics) -  2000s: argumentation (and logics) -  2010s: outside interest/wake-up call from e-

discovery (and logics)

-  a research community of ~500 people - main confs ICAIL and JURIX; AI&law journal

published by $pringer

A couple of real-life examples

(Ronkainen (2010): Mosong, a Fuzzy Logic Model of Trade Mark Similarity)

What we do at TrademarkNow -  trademark search: making sure your new

brand isn’t too close to earlier trademarks to give your problems

-  trademark watch: alerting you about new filings too close to your own marks to help you take the necessary steps to protect them (by filing an opposition against the new mark)

-  globally, now >60 jurisdictions fully covered

How we do it -  data acquisition, import -  inbound processing of individual marks, storage -  search and watch UIs -  likelihood of confusion algorithm -  similarity of trademarks

-  phonetical, graphical, semantic, animal, mineral -  similarity of goods and services

-  registrability (absolute grounds) analysis and other useful information (e.g. dictionary results)

-  reporting -  ...all using all kinds of AI techniques from GOFAI to

deep learning as appropriate

Why Finland needs more AI & law -  fewest lawyers per capita in the OECD -  court system struggles esp. with processing

times (many, many ECHR judgements) - most solutions have to be jurisdiction-

specific (because the law is so different) -  small country = small market, not all that

interesting for outsiders

Why AI & law needs Finland -  the AI & law research community has been

rather insular (focus on just a couple of special topics at a time, no new ideas coming from the outside)

-  little focus on building systems with a practical impact (or even validation, or even doing work that can be validated)

-  ...and (of course) lots of amazeballs AI people with mad skillz in Finland

Thank you!