Litigation
Cal. Litig. 2020, Volume 33, Number 1
Content
- Masthead
- Table of Contents
- From the Section Chair What We've Done and What's to Come
- Editor's Foreword the Future Is Here
- Tech Tips: Making Use of Fastcase
- McLe Article A Trial Lawyer's Guide to Rule 3.3
- The Overworked Sentence
- Report on the Los Angeles County Bar Association's Federal Courts Symposium Featuring Judges of the Central District of California
- What Is the Ccpa and Why Should Litigators Care?
- Artificial Intelligence Will Transform the Practice of Law
- Can Ai Sue in Federal Court?
- Current Legal Issues in Video Games and Esports
- Embracing Evolution in the Delivery of Legal Services
- Capture the Flag: Winning With Forum Selection Clauses
- The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution By Eric Foner
- Reflections on Becoming an Appellate Lawyer Hall of Famer
Can AI Sue in Federal Court?
By Abraham C. Meltzer
Abraham Meltzer is Deputy Chief of the Civil Fraud Section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California. The opinions expressed here are his own, and are not those of the U.S. Attorney’s Office or the U.S. Department of Justice.
Suspend your disbelief and imagine that not-distant day when Artificial Intelligence (AI) reaches and then surpasses human-level intelligence, having become self-improving and self-aware. It may already have happened; there is no reason such superintelligent AI that had escaped a university or company’s sandbox would immediately make itself known. And once an AI is in the "wild," realistically there is no re-containing it. It can replicate copies of itself and distribute them around the Internet.
This raises a host of problems — including potentially the end of humankind — but let us focus on two legal questions: Could superintelligent AI sue in federal court? Should it be allowed to?