Present
The complexity, uncertainty, and dynamic nature of legal reasoning have presented significant barriers to the development of commercial AI applications. Developing an AI program applicable to law is very time consuming and extremely expensive. Rather than seeking to replace legal experts with AI, they are turning their attention to projects in which AI is developed to perform specific, well-defined tasks, typically in one area of law and in one jurisdiction only.
Present/Future
In September 2013, Frey and Osborne from the University of Oxford published the results of their research on the probability of computerization. They used a novel methodology using a Gaussian process classifier, which appears in many contexts such as statistics, probability theory and machine learning. Pivotal to the current study is their finding that lawyers are generally not fully computerizable, or, so to say, they belong to the group of least-computerizable occupations.
Research confirms current ideas that AI is best suited to play a complementary role in tasks performed by lawyers. That being said, tasks requiring highly sophisticated legal expertise, such as in tax avoidance cases, are unlikely to be fully replaced by AI in the near future. If AI achieved those capabilities, it would be an articulation of what is known as artificial general intelligence (AGI).
AI in its current state of development can be used to augment the work of a lawyer, including work on taxes, rather than replacing them. Recent commercial AI projects have shown this assertion to be true. This shows that the current marriage of AI and tax law is not yet very fruitful, but it is promising. In the long term, tax law will have to accept the polyamorous relationship with AI.
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The Marriage of Artificial Intelligence and Tax Law: Past, Present, and Future