The AI Industry Is Playing God, in the Weirdest Possible Way This sentiment had been also argued by Professor Richard Susskind, President of the Scoiety for Computers and Law, IT Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice, and Chair of the Advisory Board of the Oxford Internet Institute, independent adviser to international professional firms and national governments. His work has been translated into more than 10 languages.
The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services (2009), is part of sequel to Richard Susskind’s legal best-seller of 1996, The Future of Law. Ten years on, and half-way towards the twenty-year vision he set out, Susskind takes stock of progress, introduces vital new emerging technologies, and envisages even more radical change to the legal world than before. This is a world in which, at least in part, legal services are commoditized, IT renders conventional legal advice redundant, clients and lawyers are collaborators under the one virtual roof, disputes are dominated by technology if not avoided in the first place, and online systems and services compete with lawyers in providing access to the law and to justice. For the conservative legal adviser, the message is bleak. For the progressive lawyer, an exciting new legal market emerges. In particular, he aims to explore the extent to which the role of the traditional lawyer can be sustained, in the face of the challenging trends in the legal marketplace and the new techniques and technologies for the delivery of legal services.
The IT/AI approach assumes that with sufficient training, or enough resources, human-like intelligence can be created from scratch, without addressing the fundamental ways in which humans are embodied, relational, and set within wider ecology. It also assumes that intelligence is something that exists independently, as though it were natural and distinct from social, cultural, historical, and political forces. In fact, the concept of intelligence has done inordinate harm over centuries and has been used to justify relations of domination from slavery to eugenics.
In his 2013 book, Tomorrow’s Lawyers, Susskind implore tomorrow’s lawyers, to be honest with yourselves and with society about those areas of legal endeavor that genuinely must be preserved for lawyers in the interest of clients. He think, legal services can responsibly and reliably be offered by non-lawyers, the law is no more there to provide a living for lawyers than ill health exists to offer a livelihood for doctors. it is not the purpose of law to keep lawyers in business.
I agree with Professor Susskind that there is a great need to re-haul current American legal system. With so many laws, even the federal government doesn’t know how many laws there are in America! They tried to count them all in 1982 and eventually gave up. On there other hand, I study Philosophy and Napoleon Code ( a little bit), I feel the pure IT approach is just as absurd as American legal system does not have Jurisprudence as part of the foundational framework. It is a reflection of American status quo for this moment. The American Founding Fathers had an every-man-for-himself mindset. They didn’t want citizens to lose that DIY quality, and they were convinced that security nets like welfare for the poor or even equal education laws would make the country weak and reliant on others. They didn’t realize they could also make us strong, if we keep up the critical thinking and practices on discernment, working on our Dream of Enlightenment/Perfection. A new frame of reference (awareness) must be both intellectually formulated and consciously, meaningfully lived because knowledge is not just about data, but about how that data is organized, interpreted, and applied within a worldview that shapes human action, in another words, the theory need to be lived consciously and meaningfully.
For example, the Cornell-7 case just get exposed in the last two days when it happened in 2024, why? It is a reflection of failure of conscience as leader of western civilization. The global elites had their parts to blame as they had all the resources and authorities to push for certain kind of culture. It is not that we want to abolition of Man, but many men these days does not deserve their authority or manhood, just as Epstein file revealed.
The Shariah Law in the Middle East is a sharp contrast the American common law. The shariah-based legal system operated for over a thousand years. Just for that alone, we should respect the Muslim civilization. There should be more clarity, egalitarian, ethics, accessible, affordable, consistency and more wholesome balanced in Law. With multi-culture and multi race in American population, there is a great need for inter-faith, inter-culture-law integration for consistent common understanding and to adhere to the best possible practices. And if American want to keep global trade with other partners, there is a great need for all involved to buy-off a common language of rules and regulations, had that been the way, there would not be such tension of US-China trade war.
One example is Sumbul Ali-Karamali, a Muslim American who grew up in California, she answer many questions on Islam ever since she can remember. After becoming a corporate lawyer, she earned an additional degree in Islamic law. She hopes to promote intercultural understanding with Demystifying Shariah: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It’s Not Taking Over Our Country (2020) – A direct counterpoint to fear mongering headlines about shariah law—The line we need to walk is a difficult one. It has to include enough historical context to give a fair idea of how a very complex legal tradition came to be, how it has been expressed, and what it really means. It has to be written by an insider who can give it a fair shake without veering into Pollyanna territory, goalpost moving, and special pleading. And it has to be short and engaging enough for people to read without getting bored and putting it down. Ms. Ali-Karamali has done a very good job. Her background in digesting legal issues for general audiences has served her well here. The book covers the main areas thoroughly enough in just over 200 pages.
Through scare tactics and deliberate misinformation campaigns, anti-Muslim propagandists insist wrongly that shariah is a draconian and oppressive Islamic law that all Muslims must abide by. They circulate horror stories, encouraging Americans to fear the “takeover of shariah” law in America and even mounting “anti-shariah protests” . . . . with zero evidence that shariah has taken over any part of our country. (That’s because it hasn’t.) It would be almost funny if it weren’t so terrifyingly wrong—as puzzling as if Americans suddenly began protesting the Martian occupation of Earth.
Demystifying Shariah explains that shariah is not one set of punitive rules or even law the way we think of law—rigid and enforceable—but religious rules and recommendations that provide Muslims with guidance in various aspects of life. Sumbul Ali-Karamali draws on scholarship and her degree in Islamic law to explain shariah in an accessible, engaging narrative style—its various meanings, how it developed, and how the shariah-based legal system operated for over a thousand years. She explains what shariah means not only in the abstract but in the daily lives of Muslims. She discusses modern calls for shariah, what they mean, and whether shariah is the law of the land anywhere in the world. She also describes the key lies and misunderstandings about shariah circulating in our public discourse, and why so many of them are nonsensical.