FutureLaw 2021 Opening Keynote: There Oughta be a Law

so allen k is

something of a legend in the world of computer science

and artificial intelligence uh in his early

work at darpa and xerox he contributed

evelopment of object oriented programming

raphical user interfaces we all

use today so in recognition of his work

award in computer science the draper prize the touring award

the kyoto prize so

so we're uh extremely honored alan

and and really pleased to have you here with us today

and to give us your perspective on computational

law so with that i'll turn it over to you

thanks very

much i'm going to try sharing my screen here

and uh

if people are seeing a strip

of uh

other windows besides me down the right hand

side that's going to interfere with some of the materials

i'm showing but anyway i will just

start and i will let the

people who are running the

session uh decide

what what to do with that

thank you very much for inviting me uh

i'm a little uh rocky today because

had my second uh vaccination

shot yesterday but uh there's nothing

like the adrenaline from fear in

giving a talk

and

this thing started off

when mike contacted me a little

over a month ago and

he asked if i could do a keynote for this conference

and i didn't know what

this was about and should have something to

do with computers legal system society of the future

and all of

these uh interesting people in the audience

most of whose uh

professions i'm not very aware with about

and then he wanted me to do it very quickly

so of course i said okay

why not and

i'd like to i'd

like to thank the people who helped me on this talk

ahead of time because it gets lost in the shuffle at the end

so you see their names here

the connections from

mike to katy and mark steffik through tim

miller to bertram mala were particularly

useful thank you all

and of course i thought of this old cartoon

being an old guy

this is a series of cartoons that

were essentially gotcha cartoons

uh people say

one set of things and all of a sudden it turns out to be

worse or different uh later and it was

eries was called there ought to be a law

and the first thing

was asked about

this talk was well there are these nine people

who have a lot of

influence in what's going on

they're all lawyers they all have top

degrees from everywhere they're all really smart

in many

minds inside of our skull manifested by our brain

we could have as many as 80 or 90 of them

three that were articulated

uh some years ago that have been particularly

useful is a way

of thinking about things and way of doing things that

is through touch

of doing things and

another way of doing

things is through

our visual system and i include

in this are our hearing system they

both are basically configurative

and then

we have this very recent symbolic

system that's probably only a few

hundred thousand years old

now and these uh

not just these three ways of doing things

but are maybe 10 or 15 or 20 different ways

doing things conflict with themselves patron saint here

is jerome brunner

and

our theaters inside

of our heads are mostly not human

most of the way our brain

works are in common with other

primates and mammals

and this is not the way we think of ourselves so we're constantly

[Music] fooling

ourselves i'll i'll pick the patron saint here as

daniel kahneman from thinking fast

and slow very renowned nobel

prize winner uh it was basically

a behavioral psychologist

and then

we are immersed inside the play that

from the cultures that we are in

and it's the nature of our genetics

for us to become part of that play

especially when we're children but

all ages when we

go to another place we start acculturating

and we're much more shaped by

we think and i could pick a number

of people here i picked marshall mcluhan

because he was particularly interested in

how the media that we're more and more embedded

in now is

a environment

and a culture itself and is affecting us

uh very deeply i

put a halo on uh jerry brunner here because he's sometimes

called saint jerome and

one of the largest minds of the 20th century

this guy was interested

and extremely well versed in

many areas he was one of the founders

miller of cognitive psychology

but his deep

hobby was also anthropology and he really

spanned the gamut of

human culture in so many ways

so these five dimensions and i'll these

some of these characters will come back again

in this uh in this talk

and uh well this is puck

what fools these mortals be and we can see the vulcans visited

earth at least 400 years ago

and what what did puck

mean or shakespeare speaking through puck

well we're easily fooled we want to be fooled

we pay to be fooled

we fool ourselves and we pay to fool others

o

the world that we actually live in

is much more of a generated

symbolic world

in which uh story

is the central element rather than what might actually

be going on out of the world

here's an example

mother

uh wants to crack some nuts

and her nine-year-old son

utcracker so she starts grooming

because

at some point she can demand

of him to groom her

it says come on

he starts doing it watch what happens

here as soon as he gets both hands

over there

he grabs your lock

very happily

mammals are con artists here's

a dog that looks like like

he's in desperate

state

when somebody

stops

tosses

out some food and whoops

o another

aspect of this theatrical approach to

life we have is we project our beliefs

world so the talmud has

a really good line about that as we see things not

as they are but as we are

this i think is the key here for

trying to deal with uh

modern inventions modern

world that is full of us

ancient human brains

computer people could help

things tremendously if

they were less interested in computers and more interested in

people however the psychology of

computing not a hundred percent

but it caters very very strongly

to people who are uneasy with people with uh

human beings the computers uh

seem to be uh much less threatening

so computer people have

traditionally had a really difficult time

understanding

the idea that humans are supposed to be using these things

so here's an example of projection

we take two poker chips here

and we organize them

so that one is

twice as far away from the other

if we look at the image on the retina as descartes indeed

did by scraping the back of an ox's

eye after the ox was dead thank goodness

what we see is the lens an

animal lens actually works like a glass lens

and the image on the retina of

the further away one is half the size

of the closer one then

we've got a kind of a pachinko machine called a brain

here and this

information from the retina goes to lots of different

including a place in the brain

where we believe things and one of the beliefs

about poker chips is that they're the same

size and so this is a this

information that's and it's on the retina

and another part of this complex

that we have inside of our heads

call the dream it's basically a theater

where

many many different parts

of the processing in our brain

we're not aware of are consolidated

together into something that

internally is is what we treat

reality and so

the compromise here is between

a half size on the retina and

the same size knowledge

that we have and so the dream decides

that the smaller one is about 80 percent

rather than 50 the size

and then we have this interesting thing is the dream

is actually what we think is out there

and what we think is out there when we actually look at this

we can do it with our thumbs too

but is actually out there we think

something that is uh

80 for the further away one

that's what we see when we look at our thumbs like this

uh artists get around this

by measuring by being very

careful about the angles that are

subtended and so forth but this projection

of what our beliefs are

and our conclusions out onto the world as though

it's actually happening out in the world

has gotten our species

trouble over

hundreds of thousands of years it's one of the major

things we have to think about whenever we're doing

anything that involves either

ideas communication or power

and mcluhan had

the great line for this it's not seeing as believing

but until i believe it i can't see it

is the way human perception actually works

you have to learn how to do it and your learning

might not be perfect so

the thinking fast

and slow book kahneman

proposes uh what he calls

uh two expository fictions

meaning they're not true

but pretending they are really helps

thinking about uh something much more

complicated so he just divides our entire

mentality up into six system one

which are all of the mechanisms in their

designed to go really fast

quick reactions

done by correlations

of the kind that machine learning does

they're very simple they're not cognitive

the system one system does not really know what's going on

and then there's this system two

which is not a very good thinker but at least it tries

it's slow it's pondering and makes up

reasons for things and one of the

metaphors that kahneman used in this book was

uh our our our

mentality is a little bit like somebody

riding on a on an elephant

and sometimes guiding the elephant but sometimes

the elephant just wants to do something and

what system two does is to make up a reason

for it as though it had come up

with the motivation for doing it so if the elephant

rears up [Music]

the person the the writer

of the elephant says well i wanted to do that

but in fact a

careful brain scan studies show that much

of the time system two never got to think

about it system one just decided to do something

and system two noticing it in this theater came

up with a reason for it so robert

heinlein once said we're not rational animals

we're rationalizing animals

here's one

of my favorite condiment

biases this guy

wants to catch a baboon

and you can find this video

on youtube if you want to find out why

here's a young juvenile baboon watching

with interest but he's digging a hole in this termite

yield there

and he's putting some seeds in the hole

and then he backs

off

primates

what is in there

puts his hand in there

grabs onto those

seeds and now he can't

get his hand out because he won't let go of the

seeds he could let go of him

and run away but in fact he's not going to let go of it

so the hunter

just comes over and catches

him ties

the seeds

the seeds this reminds you of anything that you've

done a hundred or a thousand times

o kahneman and tversky

put together uh

and came up with the term cognitive biases they

started collecting weird

where we aren't thinking at all reasonably

they came up with i don't know a few hundred of

them there's a good wikipedia page

for these

um

so

yeah so this one was loss

aversion favorite one

here is dunning krueger

these smug pilots have lost touch with

regular passengers like us who thinks i should fly the plane

we just had a president kind of like that

but if

you want gunning krueger take a look at pretty much every computer

program in the planet it is the

maximum of being more confident

than it should be about what it's able to do and what

another one confirmation bias we should all

know that one being researchers and academics

we look for things

that support what what we think is going on we're totally

story based even when we think we're trying

to be scientific

so

basically what's going on

here is an enormous part

of us is atavistic

and in fact what's going on right now

uh through zoom is

campfire where somebody's

up there telling stories here's mike checking me out to make

sure i'm going to end this on on time

[Music] and

we're wired for stores we use stories for so

many different things even when it's not a good

idea and uther

horse in here this guy from a hundred thousand years

ago everything at this

modern campfire would be completely familiar to him

and this

is because he has pretty much the same brain that we have

he wants the same things

and if we give him a haircut and

a briefcase and modern version

of a sphere of a spear which is a tomahawk

basically

the same thing obtains

and this is something we have to remember that

and it's something that is used all the time

in the courts and in

every kind of advocacy and [Music]

prosecution and defense

is turn it into a good story and you

don't have to worry about the truth

because we don't care whether the stories are true we

and to be the way we think things

o bertrand

russell wrote a book about power

and one of the major ideas

in it is hey no matter what system you

devise you need to arrange to allow the most

able energetic and aggressive to prosper

or they will game it to death and eventually undo

it there's a lot of contention right now

with people simply

trying to get their own way by gaming

things and

the law has to be above that but it isn't

his

pamphlet was key

to the

uh direction that our country took

and it's a joke because

it in fact is not about

what common sense was at all common sense was

you should have a monarchy but

what he tries to do is come up with a new common sense and one of

the great principles in there he says instead of having

the king be the law we can have the law be the king

meaning we should be able to

invent a better society than we

just blundered our way into

and so

this pamphlet which uh

900 000 went out to 1.5 million

colonists in the first six months right

before the declaration of independence was one

of the most influential pieces of writing in

american history then this great

book by uh anthony

amsterdam who is a supreme court litigator and

a distinguished lawyer and legal

theorist many of you will know of him and jerry

brenner uh jerry lives along

jerry lived just slightly past

of 100. and so he had many

different careers and he spent 10 years in

the nyu law school as a professor

this is one of the books that they

came up with

and their aim is to make what is familiar strange again which

number one job i think for any university

uh the toughest people to

are people who know something

because they often know it only too well

and it talks

for a person who doesn't know a lot about the law this

the best introductions

to what it's really about

but what was interesting is that the

thrust of this book what they looked

at to make up the book was

what the supreme court

actually does and did and has done

how much what they've done

has not been particularly logical

at all but has been organized around

different kinds of story lines

and narrative

i think understanding

narrative being able to generate narrative

to be able to deal with narrative

on a human scale is critical

attempt to be serious

about computing in the law

so here's an example

of what is sometimes called the private universe

from nsf a few years ago

right after the

harvard commencement they went

around and asked some questions

heart

despite a lifetime of the very best education

students in our classrooms are failing to

learn science many of these students will graduate

from college with the same scientific misconceptions that

they had on entering grade school to test

how a lifetime of education affects our understanding of science

ask these recent graduates some simple questions in

astronomy consider for example how

cold it is at any given time of the year has to do

with the closeness of the earth to the

sun during the season the earth goes

around the sun and

now

after i saw this i was

had taught a class at ucla so i went

and asked some of the students if they've come outside

with me to talk about

both the phases of the moon question

and the seasons because

to ask for instance this

guy uh well

do you know when it's summer up

here in the northern hemisphere do you know what the

season is in the southern hemisphere and

all the students i talked to knew it was

winter and all of a sudden they realized oh the

distance the distance to the sun can't

be the main thing about the seasons and

to those who thought the earth got in between

the moon and the sun to cause the phases

of the moon i asked them if they'd ever seen the sun

moon in the sky at the same

course we have on many occasions

and the moon is usually in face

and so the earth cannot possibly be between there

so i think we can get two ideas

this that the major curriculum at harvard

at least is confidence 101

and from the time i spent at stanford i would say

that that's true there also

but the other thing

is that the what nsf was exploring as

a knowledge problem is not just a knowledge problem

a cognitive problem and we have to thank

the harvard students for not having the knowledge

because the cognitive problem is that they had

seen in their lives every single one of them

examples to what their

main theory was and none of their

training in their entire life had

set them up with the heuristic to try and compare

know about

uh the earth and the planets

so this is a much bigger failure than simply

not knowing something

so this gives rise to this private universe

idea that we have

very different worlds in our brains

we project them out on the world

and we have trouble communicating so a mane and hooves

well

not necessarily a horse

and in fact in med school this people who

come up with the zebra from that description are called zebras

people who come up with the most complicated

diagnosis rather than the one that's the most

but

for these two kids uh they can

eventually get to agree on what

hamburger is that comes into their shared space

and we can see that that words are

kind of uh an

invention that allows us to point to things

that are in our jointly shared imagination

so language came after the gesture

so if you go to an upgrade of this campfire

because the theater

grew out of what happened in campfires

we noticed this interesting thing about

storytelling in general and

audience's intelligence

is relied on to make sense

of what's happening

even in a movie

so the the only

intelligence in the room is the audience there and you have to do

something in this shared space to get the

understand what you want them to understand

and the theater

is sometimes called the magic mirror precisely

because uh

its job the job of this

kind of media is to beam the audience's intelligence

out at them and we can see that

this is one of bruner's mentalities

iconic in fact if you take acting

lessons the first thing they'll get you to do is not

just pantomime but to learn how to pose

because posing is the the

center of what the theatrical art

is about there are words

in fact we can get rid of the

everything except the words by inventing

writing and this puts a real burden

on the audience the audience

has to do a lot of learning but the learning they do helps

them think differently and changes the way civilization

turns out when a computer comes

on the scene it's inherently

a backstage kind of

thing nobody it doesn't have a story to tell

so you have to provide some kind

of a story this is what we did at xerox park which will be

familiar to you today

and it uses both the iconic and the

symbolic mentalities of bruner and

the fact that we can touch it

and we even made some interfaces

that could touch back

so the idea here with relevance

conference is pretty much

i think what comp law should be about right

primarily user interface

for something more complicated than what we were

xerox park and you make progress by inventing

entirely new environment not just doing

little experiments

this interface worked because

it its

semantics was grounded on itself

it was about itself it wasn't about the outside world

and the uh object-oriented stuff

at xerox park was able to create

an ontology that allowed the system uh

to be very self-explanatory and exploratory

in various ways but if we take something

like uh montesquieu's spirit

of laws and put it on a computer

as a book but for most of

this book years ago and it was a

real struggle most of us want

an ai or something that can really help

us learn so the user

interface is not just about

access to functions

it's also about learning and exploring

and getting more versed in what

is an entire world that you're giving the user to live in

and the grounding

problem is well put by einstein

when he compares mathematics which

is not grounded in anything except itself

and science which has to be grounded

reality and so you

can use math and science as long as

you realize your grounding is not going to be perfect and that

your main job is to find the groundings that

mathematical logic to come to conclusions

about the real world

well okay

so

in order to point to something

in our shared space we have to imagine the same things

it's very likely that's what these cave paintings were about

and it's not that we don't

uh imagine things

we can imagine angels 77 of us believe

there are angels 94 percent of us believe

there are supreme beings many

too many of us believe

in a human sacrifice still going

on about half of us

pretty much everywhere believe in witches and demons i mean

in demons and ghosts 21

still believe in witches

you can look up the great cat massacre

when they decided the cats were the witches in france

in the 17th century

we believe in war we can imagine war

and we can

imagine something going wrong when we're vaccinated

so we have all of these things we can imagine and talk about

and people do but most

of us have had a hard time imagining

tiny little viruses and

the devastating deaths are

precisely the result of not

understanding something that a small percentage

of scientists and anybody who understood their

grade biology course would

understand so his current schooling has failed

disastrously and because there are second

and third waves societal learning from the first waves

and thinking have also failed

and of course even smaller is the carbon

dioxide model uh

molecule and we're flunking this

badly this is the

okay uh

i had a rant here but i decided i would

just ask you in this conference to consider the

the following two questions how weak is the current

state of the art of computer generated explanation

and computer-assisted learning especially

compared to what it was 40 years ago

it got up to a certain state 40 years ago it's gotten

slightly better since then but i

couldn't find anything like what i expected

and what seems to be going on is

somehow a lot of researchers

are like this guy who lost his keys back

here and

well he found a skate

key has machine learning

and semantic web on it and if you keep on working

might get a better skate key the problem

is you're not going to get the access to the vehicle

you wanted in the first place so

uh yeah this is

this is the symbol i put on my slides to quit

talking know more about that

okay so now i'll finish up

some some bright

prospects first uh thanks

to tim miller for bringing this

book by bertram to my attention

i think it's terrific

he considers himself a cultural psychologist

he was inspired by brenner

and it's a book about the way people

try to explain things to themselves

to others and gives a kind

of what you might call a common sense

uh framework for

humans actually go about

doing things and there are other books

associated with so it's all

about what can we agree on

how do you find meanings with the

private

universes and

many many different topics

that i've not seen treated quite this way

um

our field i think only a few

actually been treated

in a.i so there are many many

other ways to look at it and

an example of a an enormous

effort over decades with

tens of millions of relationships

and ways of inferring things

course psych by doug lennon

and this is worth looking

at again

ot because it's the answer to today's problem so much

but because of what's in it

is hard to escape having to have

answers for and it's the only

large-scale artifact of its kind that i know

of that has uh that could actually be talked

about and many things have happened

about the theory of causality over the

last 40 years including this

the work of judea pearl

and then finally there are

new uh user interface

people on the scene the user interface is probably at its lowest

level

uh in computing uh that it's

been for a long time except there are people

like brett victor

here who is

just an amazing talent

so if you look at this these

four things here we've got

a framework for thinking

we've got ways of dealing

with uh the

areas of logic that we can deal with we've got examples

of huge artifacts

that are going to be required in order to do cognitive ai

t's not that there isn't going to be machine learning as

part of it but having machine learning

central part is the tail wagging

the dog and then finally there

are some great user interface thinkers on

the scene so

i think you need to make a platform

think these are four starting places

to do such a platform

i think these are the four places i would start i'd look for

some sort of vector sums of these

dimensions uh get everybody

involved in a new grand challenge and synthesis

and make the center of it dealing with critical

are considered to be important

thank you very much

i'm sorry for running over a little bit but that's thanks

alan thank you so much for this uh

wonderful very human-centric framework

you've uh given us as a wonderful

basis for for the rest of our our conference

so we very much appreciate you and appreciate you

taking the time uh for sharing your ideas

about the world of law and technology

and uh and yeah

please accept you know my applause as an applause on behalf

the over 600 people who i'm

sure share the enthusiasm about your about your