Right now, as I write, researchers are loading medical journal articles into a computer to see if they can tease out the causes of cancer. Their goal is to use the artificial intelligence (AI) trio of big data, natural language processing, and machine learning to automate research on causal models of the complex biological systems underlying cancer.

Who’s doing this, you ask? It’s the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. That’s right, DARPA is researching cancer. As the agency explains it, the systems that matter most to the Defense Department tend to be very complicated systems in which interactions have important causal effects. While cancer might not be foremost as a system that influences national defense, its biology certainly is a complicated system in which interactions have important causal effects. So DARPA is testing methods for learning more about what causes cancer so it can learn more about the complex systems that do drive national defense decisions.

DARPA calls its research initiative the Big Mechanism program. Big mechanisms are models of how complex systems work. Although the collection of data needed to develop a big mechanism model is now largely automated—thus the rise of big data—the development of big mechanisms is still mainly the product of human research and reasoning ingenuity. The point of the Big Mechanism project is to see whether the development of useful big mechanism models also can be automated. If they can be, then DARPA could (automatically) load big data into the model to (automatically) develop causal models to (automatically) predict what’s going to happen of relevance to national defense.

OK, what’s this got to do with law? Most of the applications of AI in law thus far have been to improve predictive capacity in a non-causal sense, such as using machine learning in e-discovery to sort documents. The prediction isn’t based on a causal model. There’s certainly a lot of value in that approach, both scientifically and commercially. But what about law’s big mechanism? Surely the legal system is a complicated system in which interactions have important causal effects. If we had a big mechanism model of what factors cause moves in the legal system, such as the next new wave of products liability litigation, that would be a very different kind of predictive capacity. Knowing what’s coming next can come in handy for lawyers!

Shift over to another outfit called Praedicat, a spin-off of the RAND Corporation. Praedicat is using AI to develop big mechanism models of catastrophe risk for the property and casualty insurance industry. As the company explains it, their AI applications “track the science and commercial exposures for more than 100 emerging risks” and “bring technology to insurers’ emerging risk activities, converting risk avoidance to portfolio optimization; exclusion to accumulation management; and avoiding the “next asbestos” to driving sustainable profits.” Like DARPA, Praedicat relies on “the world’s community of toxicologists, epidemiologists, and bioscientists to algorithmically identify emerging risks.” Their “patented “saliency” algorithm combs through the corpus of peer-reviewed science [and regulatory documents] for new hypotheses that chemicals, products and substances might cause bodily injury. The risks are automatically prioritized by the energy and intensity of new attention the risks receive, and are tracked over time as they mature.” Then it produces “industry profiles to capture the litagion^® agents that might be found at companies in the industry, and provides a “heat map” that explores the potential for clash between the profiled industry and other industries.” “Litagion agents”? That’s not a misspelling. It’s Praedicat’s trademarked term for what is essentially the big mechanism model of catastrophe insurance litigation.

What Praedicate is doing is the same as what DARPA is doing, but for insurance litigation. Open the lens wider and one can imagine applying the same approach to search for the “litagion agents” for IP litigation, drug litigation, securities litigation, products liability litigation, and a wide variety of other legal applications.  That would be law’s big mechanism. That would be cool!