Artificial intelligence as an object and a resource in legal education

Abstract

When I was a child, I found in a corner of the public library a story about a futuristic ship with a machine that answered all the questions that boys and girls asked it. Since I was full of questions, the idea seemed fabulous to me. Years later, I learned that the interest in machines with knowledge and reasoning ability has been a constant in the history of humanity. An example are the golden maidens described in the Iliad, created by Hephaestus, who possessed understanding and speech. With this same curiosity, throughout the centuries, automata and machines with logical systems were designed, such as the Ars Generalis Ultima, or the Turing machine. It was not until the mid-20th century that two milestones provided solid foundations for the development of artificial intelligence (Ai) systems: the first, the construction of Minsky’s computational neural network at Princeton University, and the second, the Dartmouth Conference, in which John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence.

Currently, Ai is defined as software systems –occasionally also hardware– designed by humans that, given a complex objective, act in the physical or digital dimension by collecting data from the environment, interpreting them, processing the information derived from those data, and deciding the actions they must take to achieve the established goal.

Given the ethical, legal, and social implications of Ai, it constitutes a relevant topic in the training of law professionals, and consequently, for the field of legal education and the institutions that provide it.