When
I was recently writing a brief on a complex and nuanced constitutional issue, I
couldn’t help but think how much faster and better “Cameron” could have done
the job. Cameron is the (for now)
fictional A.I. from the outstanding but short-lived Sarah Connor Chronicles. Within mere seconds she could have read and
understood every statute, court opinion, and law review article ever written on
the issue. And in just a few minutes more
she could have assimilated the relevant sources into a persuasive legal brief that
would have put even my best writing to shame.
For now, Cameron is fictional.
But two other robots named ROSS and
RAVIN are real. And here’s a newsflash: ROSS
and RAVIN are not coming for lawyer jobs; rather, they’ve already taken them.
Some
studies estimate that 40 percent of legal jobs could be taken by the robots
within a decade. (This would obviously exacerbate the already significant unemployment problem facing new law grads.) Predictably, many of
those involved in developing and improving the robot lawyers attempt to quell
fears by disputing this. But they don’t
give any reasons for their reassuring predictions that A.I. will not displace
any more lawyer jobs than it already has.
For example, according to one A.I. developer: “At present . . . the majority of individuals who need a lawyer cannot
afford one. Yet on the other hand, [many] law graduates are saddled in debt and
cannot find work.” But what does that even mean? And what is its relevance to
the question of how many more jobs A.I. will take from human lawyers?
More
honestly, according to another A.I. developer, there is a “notion of AI being able
to replace all lawyers.” And this is a notion with which he agreed, so it’s really a question of
when, not if, it will happen. And to this
question he replied, “I don't see that as something that will happen in the
next couple of years.”
For
more on the impact of technology on the labor market see my previous post Robots Rising. And for what life could be like
after most of our jobs have been taken by the machines, listen to Planet Money’s
outstanding episode The Last Job. Its point: even after humans invented the mousetrap, cats still needed to hunt mice. And even after A.I. takes over the legal profession, human lawyers will still need to read, write, and argue. But the problem might be that no one will want to hire them.
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