Notes

One short paragraph per appearance or paper, in three parts: the question that was actually asked, the answer I gave, and the difficulty that remains. Then the recording or the paper, so the paragraph can be checked against what was said. Newest first. The appearances themselves are listed under Media & speaking.

• 20 September 2026

  What would keep AI-mediated justice from becoming Orwellian? ¶

  Ahead of a reading group at the Creative Destruction Lab, University of Toronto, on 22 September 2026, pairing Superjustice with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  The question. Orwell’s state ran on total information: it made every citizen legible to power and kept power illegible to citizens. A legal system that reasons at machine speed over everyone’s records can be described in exactly those words. So what, in the design Superjustice proposes, stops it from becoming that?

  The answer. The direction of legibility. Airstrip One watched everyone and could be watched by no one; the book’s design constraint is the reverse. The systems that apply law are made inspectable, with representative training data, published fairness metrics, audit trails, and reasoning that can be read, while the person subject to a decision keeps the right to be heard by a human who is answerable for it. A biased model can be audited; on the present evidence, a biased official usually cannot. And legal reasoning cannot be allowed to belong to a few hands. The book calls private ownership of it a privatization of the justice system and answers with mandated transparency, limits on reliance on private providers, open alternatives, and publicly provided AI legal agents as a right, on the model of the public defender.

  The hard part. Every one of those safeguards is a rule, and rules are what a determined state rewrites. Inspectability protects against error and hidden bias; it does not, by itself, protect against a sovereign that wants the outcome the system produces. That protection is institutional and political before it is technical, and the book is stronger on the technical half than on the political one. Orwell offered no design fix at all. His warning was about what people would come to tolerate, and no architecture answers that.

  Sources: the reading group, 22 September 2026, on the Superjustice schedule · the objections to Superjustice, stated in their strongest form, with the book’s answers · the book.

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