The Legal Singularity

Adopting a cautious and yet optimistic view of an uncertain legal future, The Legal Singularity presents a coherent account of the radically positive impact artificial intelligence may have in the coming decades on law and legal institutions.

Law today is incomplete, inaccessible, unclear, underdeveloped, and often perplexing to those whom it affects. In The Legal Singularity, Abdi Aidid and Benjamin Alarie argue that the proliferation of artificial intelligence-enabled technology – and specifically the advent of legal prediction – is on the verge of radically reconfiguring the law, our institutions, and our society for the better.

Revealing the ways in which our legal institutions underperform and are expensive to administer, the book highlights the negative social consequences associated with our legal status quo. Given the infirmities of the current state of the law and our legal institutions, the silver lining is that there is ample room for improvement. With concerted action, technology can help us to ameliorate the law and our legal institutions. Inspired in part by the concept of the ‘technological singularity’, The Legal Singularity presents a future state in which technology facilitates the functional “completeness” of law, where the law is at once extraordinarily more complex in its specification than it is today, and yet operationally vastly more knowable, fairer, and clearer for its subjects. Aidid and Alarie describe the changes that will culminate in the legal singularity and explore the implications for the law and its institutions.

Author Biography

Abdi Aidid is a graduate of Yale Law School and assistant professor of law at the University of Toronto.

Benjamin Alarie holds the Osler Chair in Business Law at the University of Toronto and is an affiliated faculty member at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.