Posts Tagged: "natural language processing"

On September 8th, 1966, the American broadcast network NBC aired the first episode of Star Trek, a science fiction television series conceived by Gene Roddenberry. In the decades which have followed, the original series which only lasted three seasons inspired a growing list of additional series and feature films, making a huge impact on both science fiction and pop culture. One of the more interesting aspects of Star Trek is just how much of the show’s science fiction has become technological reality.

The law waits for no one and neither does AI, which has already made a lasting impact in many areas of business, including the practice of law. Contracts, e-discovery and overall legal research have all changed thanks to AI, but as computers driven by ever-increasing processing power exhibit extraordinarily intelligent behavior we can only assume such advances are far from over. Whether within the enterprise, partners, customers, opposing litigants or elsewhere, legal assets cannot hide from the likes of Watson—or for that matter HAL—or other budding or to-be-conceived AI platforms… Despite paranoia and hyperbole surrounding AI since 2001: A Space Odyssey, intelligent computers will not take over the world, although that premise does make for exciting science fiction. While the rise of the machines is not something one should fear, AI systems and their architects have made significant strides in realizing learning machines that can adapt to dense, arcane legal terminology.