The Legal Singularity
How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better
- Publisher
- University of Toronto Press
- Initial publish date
- Jul 2023
- Category
- General, Criminology, Technology Studies
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9781487529413
- Publish Date
- Jul 2023
- List Price
- $44.95
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781487529437
- Publish Date
- Jun 2023
- List Price
- $44.95
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Where to buy it
Description
Law today is incomplete, inaccessible, unclear, underdeveloped, and often perplexing to those whom it affects. In The Legal Singularity, Abdi Aidid and Benjamin Alarie argue that the proliferation of artificial intelligence–enabled technology – and specifically the advent of legal prediction – is on the verge of radically reconfiguring the law, our institutions, and our society for the better.
Revealing the ways in which our legal institutions underperform and are expensive to administer, the book highlights the negative social consequences associated with our legal status quo. Given the infirmities of the current state of the law and our legal institutions, the silver lining is that there is ample room for improvement. With concerted action, technology can help us to ameliorate the problems of the law and improve our legal institutions. Inspired in part by the concept of the "technological singularity," The Legal Singularity presents a future state in which technology facilitates the functional "completeness" of law, where the law is at once extraordinarily more complex in its specification than it is today, and yet operationally, the law is vastly more knowable, fairer, and clearer for its subjects. Aidid and Alarie describe the changes that will culminate in the legal singularity and explore the implications for the law and its institutions.
About the authors
Abdi Aidid is a graduate of Yale Law School and assistant professor of law at the University of Toronto.
Benjamin Alarie holds the Osler Chair in Business Law in the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto and is an affiliated faculty member at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
Awards
- Winner, The 2024 PROSE Award in Legal Studies and Criminology Awarded by the Association of American Publishers
- Short-listed, 2023 Donner Prize Awarded by The Donner Prize