I agree that the system needs to have a feedback loop and the law should evolve over time. But IMO there are better ways to achieve that than introduce a biased decision maker. You can rely more greatly on legislation or bring in some evolving value system into your model.
> * it is harder to manipulate all judges in the land than changing one algorithm or its goals. The distribution and fragmentation of power is a feature and not a bug. It makes some things weird and others slow, but ultimately it helps making a dictator take over hard.
Fragmentation of power is generally a good thing. But the idea of having many judges as fragmentation of power is not actually fragmented. It would be fragmented if they all heard your case and sentenced you accordingly with some aggregation method. Or if they have a small jurisdiction. But in many cases, one judge (e.g. your sentencing judge), has all the power (ignoring appeals).
Let's assume I wanted to influence a sentencing judge. I could learn his biases. I could hire a lawyer with a good relationship with the judge. I could give him some financial incentive (e.g. kick backs from a private prison or campaign donations). I could manipulate jury selection using racial biases. I could look at the statistical properties of sentencing during different parts of the day and try to manipulate that. Less common in the US, but I could intimidate or threaten the judge.
How would that play out if it was an algorithm? I could hack into the administrating body and somehow retrain the algorithm? I could try to subvert some data scientist working on the algorithms and have them introduce slight biases into the algorithm that would eventually favor me?
I'd take my chances with the human judge. And that may be a good thing, but I don't think humans are harder to manipulate than algorithms.
> And it needs to be able to factor in circumstance in order to stay humane.
Again, I think it's a lot easier to tell an algorithm consider these new factors with the explicit goal of increase/decreasing X.
* having judges that live within a changing society is what allows laws to be changed in accordance to what the state of public debate is at a given time. For some it might be too slow or too fast, but it kind of works, if you think over the centuries.
* it is harder to manipulate all judges in the land than changing one algorithm or its goals. The distribution and fragmentation of power is a feature and not a bug. It makes some things weird and others slow, but ultimately it helps making a dictator take over hard.
Any new proposed system must be able to proof it has similar resistance against fundamental change from democracy into dictatorship, while still beeing able to slowly shift where it counts.
As a system the things we have are not bad and in western societies they managed quite well. I think any modern day proponent of alternative systems of governance should realize their hubris in the light of the things we already have working. The stuff we got is not just some service that could be run better, it is a way of preventing us from tearing ourselves and each others appart.
As desireable as algorithmic decision making sounds, it needs to be objective and deterministic. And it needs to be able to factor in circumstance in order to stay humane. But if it does so all the time it will be abused. In the end it would have to produce decisions that are accepted by humans after all.
I think for topics of high importance it would be best to have informed decisions by humans who educate themselves about the matter and bring forth arguments. For smaller decisions algorithms might work, as long as they are transparent