A critical analysis of ’Law 4.0’: The use of Automation and Artificial Intelligence and their impact on the judicial landscape of Brazil

Abstract

There is a digital revolution, called Industry 4.0, happening around the world
(and therefore, in Brazil as well!) that is shifting our activities from an ’analogic’ to a ’digital’ format. From health to education, we can see more and more
the digitalisation and the automation taking a key part of the work involved in
managing data (being it private or public) and optimising the processes in general. With this move, the ’realisation’ that there are several possible ways to
perform automation including the use of intelligent systems came to light and
it has become a particular favourite term used in any situation to name any
computational system. In the justice area, it has not been different, and, particularly, in the Brazilian Justice system, there is a strong move to have as much
automation, digitalisation of the processes as possible. However, the general
understanding of what algorithms, automation and intelligent systems can be
or perform are very foggy and, more often than not, we can see the word ’intelligent’ being used inadvertently. Thus, this paper will aim at simply define
the keywords from the computer science area: algorithm, automation and intelligent systems (artificial intelligence), evaluate the systems that are in use in
the Brazilian Justice System, specifically indicating in which category they fall
and, finally, discuss the impact of using intelligent systems without any human
intervention in the context of the so called ’Law 4.0’.