Dear Financial Times: Your 'AI Justice' narrative ignores the digital divide
The Financial Times recently highlighted the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence in legal services, framing it as a potential democratizer of justice. The article focuses on how AI tools can automate research, draft documents, and offer preliminary legal advice, suggesting a future where legal assistance is more readily available and affordable. This narrative, commonly echoed across
Western media, presents AI as an inherent good, a technological panacea for the overburdened legal system. What this perspective from outlets like the Financial Times conveniently omits, however, is the fundamental digital inequality that plagues vast swathes of the global population, particularly in the Global South. AI tools, no matter how sophisticated, require stable internet, reliable
electricity, and often, a certain level of digital literacy to operate effectively. For the nearly three billion people worldwide who remain offline, or those in regions with intermittent power and exorbitant data costs, these AI solutions are entirely inaccessible. Promoting AI as the solution to justice access without addressing the digital divide is akin to offering a state-of-the-art car to
someone without roads to drive on or fuel to power it. Historically, technological advancements touted as universal solutions often serve to entrench existing power structures and deepen disparities. Consider the global disparity in internet access, a gap that widened significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving millions in poorer nations and rural areas cut off from essential information