Google and Kissinger: The Singularity is Coming

This night's post will be very far afield from the mundane concerns of electronic discovery or general legal technology. Today I watched a Zoom webinar on which Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt discussed artificial intelligence and the future of human civilization. If you want to grab an attorney's attention about the likelihood that AI will change the way the world works, you could do worse than to point out that Nixon's international relations consigliere and ego stroker, and one of the founders of Google are concerned enough about the possibility of a technological singularity (in which AI will begin to rapidly upgrade itself independently of human control (like in Terminator, but hopefully with better results)) to co-author a book about it, The Age of AI.

Here's some key takeaways from the discussion at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies today:

- Kissinger believes that AI will involve a different perception of reality - a shift away from the perception developed during the Enlightenment.

- We may see fighter jets controlled by AI, and it will be impossible for human operators to predict what they will do.

- If machines can operate unfettered, there will be a threat to our ability to organize human life.

- There is a strong possibility that artificial intelligence will interpret its assignments differently than human programmers.

- Kissinger asked a leading AI expert what his main focus was, who answered that he was working on making objects partners with humans, and providing those objects with their own judgment. When Kissinger questioned the wisdom of doing this, the expert said that he was only focused on how to do it.

eBrevia

eBrevia's contract management software uses AI to analyze provisions in a large set of contracts an organization is party to. It will find different categories of information in contracts (price, term, renewal clause, etc.) . . .

. . . and can export the data in spreadsheet form for further review.

NIST Study on Facial Recognition - Too Many False Positives

Police across the country are increasingly making use of facial recognition software to identify suspects in crimes recorded on surveillance cameras. There have been reports of innocent people being arrested because the police relied on face recognition software. One example is the case of Robert Williams held in custody by the Detroit Police, and then later released. See, Sarah Rahal and Mark Hicks, Detroit police work to expunge record of man wrongfully accused with facial recognition, The Detroit News, June 26, 2020, available here.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology conducted a study on efficacy of facial recognition algorithms. See Patrick Grother, Mei Ngan, and Kayee Hanaoka, NISTIR 8280, Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) Part 3: Demographic Effects, December 2019, available at https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2019/NIST.IR.8280.pdf. The study concluded that the algorithms used by different developers vary widely in their accuracy. It made use of mugshots, photos submitted with applications for immigration benefits, and border crossing photographs. More than 18 million photos were reviewed. False positive results were returned far more often than false negatives, and the software exhibited different biases.

"Our main result is that false positive differentials are much larger than those related to false negatives and exist broadly, across many, but not all, algorithms tested. . . . With domestic law enforcement images, the highest false positives are in American Indians, with elevated rates in African American and Asian populations; the relative ordering depends on sex and varies with algorithm. We found false positives to be higher in women than men, and this is consistent across algorithms and datasets. This effect is smaller than that due to race.", Id. at 2.