The Face of Things to Come?
Posted By Rob Millard - 0 Comments -
Further to Field Fisher Waterhouse (and probably others) launching a branch of their law firm on Second Life, we now have a fully fledged online dispute resolution ("ODR") service on Second Life too. Oddly enough, inserting "second life" into the search engine of FFW's website yields no results. I wonder why? Too rich for the blood of their conventional clients?
See this post on ICT4Peace and in particular the nine minute video on the e-justice centre. The centre itself was created by the Portuguese Ministry of Justice in cooperation with the University of Aveiro and the Faculty of Law of the Lisbon New University. Cool architecture too and, indeed, why should 21st Century courts be grandly imposing, intimidating places?
The e-justice centre provides mediation and arbitration services for avatars resident in Second Life, focusing on conflicts deriving from consumer relations and contracts signed between parties. For those unfamiliar with Second Life, avatars may be virtual but they are nonetheless very real, representing very real people. This leads to emerging but very real legal issues.
All this is an indicator, perhaps, for how conflict resolution might evolve. This, as computers in real life reach the threshold of parity with the computing power of the human brain, followed (Moore's Law dictates about 18 - 24 months later) with computers 2x the computing power of the human brain; then 4 x, and so on, then finally laptops and maybe even PDAs [much] "cleverer" than we are. Combine this with the computer's already vastly superior capability for storing and retrieving vast quantities of data accurately, and one wonders where this path will lead over the next 3, 5, 10 years.
As somebody once said: "The future ain't what it used to be!"
Hat-tip to mediator blah...blah...blah. See also: mediation classes on second life.
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