OH HAPPY DAY! Lawyers replaced by AI Artificial intelligence is a worry on two fronts. In a worst-case scenario, we end up with The Terminator. In a less-painful scenario, we end up with billions of humans out of work as drudgery is replaced by machines. The second scenario looks just a little bit closer today, but also less painful, after the advent of “ROSS”, a …
You have to be cautious with the government unemployment statistic. It only counts the unemployed that are still looking for work. The one's that aren't part or fully employed or recorded as seeking work fall into the category of disgruntled workers (not actively seeking a job), disabled/unemployable, or do "housework." [I almost certainly missed a few.] If you look at the US numbers, the number of people falling into those last categories has been increasing. Significantly. Labor force participation (to give its name) has fallen from roughly 66% to 63%. Forgot one thing, you have overlaps in which the accounting can go more than a little screwy.
The labor force participation rate is, to me, the most disturbing thing about the current "recovery". In that same period unemployment went from 9% to 6% which means the "employment rate" went from 91% to 94%. Unfortunately that makes the total employed labor pool went from 91% x 66% = 60% to 94% x 63% = 59%. So our wonderful "recovery" saw the number of employed people drop by 1%. Granted the labor force likely grew so more people are actually employed but not a whole lot has changed in the last five years or so.
The labor force participation rate isn't a terribly good statistic to be using here. It has the problem that it doesn't distinguish based on why someone isn't part of the labor force. There's no way to tell if the decrease in labor force participation over the last 7 years is due to people being unable to find a job, demoralized or just retired.
What you're really interested in are the underemployment rates. There are actually 6 of them for the US. The standard unemployment rate (U3) includes people recently out of work and looking. The U4 rate includes discouraged workers who would like a job and have looked for work in the last year, but not the last month, because they believed there was no work available for them. The U5 rate expands that to cover any reason why the worker hasn't looked for a job in the last month. The full underemployment rate (U6) also includes all part-time workers that would like to work full-time. Incidentally, part-time workers would be considered participants in the labor force, even thought they're being underutilized.
You'll see the underemployment rate quoted occasionally--it's never nearly as rosy a picture as the unemployment rate--but it does a much better job of capturing the state of the unutilized labor force.
The latest US numbers for all 6 underemployment rates can be found at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
There are many domain-specific search engines already.
Nor is this particular product especially novel. Legal-document search is a well-established area of research in Natural Language Processing, just as medical-document search is.
The Reg is making a ... slightly bigger molehill ... out of a molehill primarily so they can indulge in lawyer jokes.
The US overproduces Lawyers in abundance - that's why so many end up "ambulance chasing". So this is going to make student debt harder to pay off. On the up side in-house lawyers for big companies may feel empowered to not use "outside council". If the big lawyers loose out it might make the US a more livable society...
but more to do with which lawyer is more charismatic and which one finds the loopholes... the quicker the machines take over the better... and it would be their own fault for charging too much ;)
Laywers are not much different to trian drivers - destined to be replaced by machines.
I think you'll find "most things legal" have nothing to do with litigation or criminal proceedings, but with contract law, probate, and other rather mundane matters where loopholes are rarely desirable and charisma need not apply at all.
UK lawyers are no doubt happy to hire a Polish plumber for £10/h but I bet they would rebel en masse if I could get a Polish lawyer for £20/h.
The last time I consulted a lawyer I had to tell the stupid git how to do his own job and still got charged hundreds for two hours work.
In the UK the legal profession is an industry based on knowledge, now that the legislation/ precedents can be found on-line rather than in a lawyer's library people have less need to consult a lawyer.
Lawyers will still be needed at the sharp end of disputes and appeals, but speaking from experience wills, conveyancy, TUPE, planning etc can be done from anywhere with an internet connection.
Even in court cases McKenzie Friends are growing in popularity, partly due to reforms to legal aid but also because the vast majority of the advice they delivery for £15- £90 p/hour is the same as you hear from a family lawyer for £250 p/hour.
Anon because my wife is lawyer!
I realise replacing all the lawyers isn't actually what the article is about, but ...
Since replacing washerwomen with robots we've started to indulge ourselves in clean shirts and underwear every day. The robots can do more, and we ordinary people can afford them (and the would-be-washerwomen themselves are freed up to do less-gruelling work).
Now, if lawyers could go the way of washerwomen, we could of course rejoice at the demise of the parasites. But maybe also be careful what we wish for, if the robotic law-machines turn us in to a society that does all our own ambulance-chasing!
That's the long run expectation: We'll eventually replace nearly all human labor with automation. There are likely to be problems in the medium term where some jobs have been replaced with automation but others haven't. The results are likely to depend on whether a given society is willing to carry those people who can no longer find a productive job until such time as the machines can automate most labor.
It's most likely that the middle class jobs will be the first to be automated (and they've gotten tons of automation already.) These jobs typically require training, but little creativity and have a reasonably high cost for the employer. In contrast, lower class jobs don't cost the employer much and they can be messy; upper class jobs are expensive for the employer, but generally require lots of training and creativity making them harder to automate. The asymmetrical job depletion means that we can't move people around to new jobs or scale up existing production easily. So you get a situation where a substantial portion of a country's human production capacity can't be used effectively and the society will have to decide whether to allow those people to starve or live on welfare.
Strange. It seems today, like most journalists think that the nr of jobs are constant. If you look at all the manual work that has been automated like washing dishes, vacuum cleaning, factories, building cars, refrigerators instead of having to buy ice etc. you would think that there would be no more jobs left.
Add to that, that we're 7 billion people, and the picture is quite clear. Increase automation of jobs will leads to one or more of the following:
1. New jobs will be created, when new inventions create new markets and demands.
2. Reduced cost of living. You might have noticed that we no longer work 7 days per week. Thanks to capitalism, we can now afford to work 5 days a week, and NOT send our children to work.
Now take 1 and 2 together, and the future will mean more fun jobs, less boring manual jobs, lower cost of living that will enable you to do more with less money, and perhaps an optional 4 day work week.
Now if we extrapolate this to the extreme... I see a future where work is optional and tends to be done in the areas of:
1. Science.
2. Culture.
3. "Government" because the politicians always need to make sure the lie that they are needed continues.
So no worry everyone! =) If you want to worry, then worry about the massive surveillance state and potential dictature that might come in the future.
Most lawyering is conventional analyis honed by probabilities based on experience.
All professionals think they have some secret sauce that makes them different and for some professionals, some of the time, that's true but mostly not.
So MYCIN gave medical doctors a shock; and
ELIZA (try it) is cheaper than your average psychotherapist.
In a less-painful scenario, we end up with billions of humans out of work as drudgery is replaced by machines.
Such a scenario could well result in a post-scarcity economy wherein no one actually had to work anymore to survive. In which case the billion-range unemployment numbers wouldn't matter.
And yes, I'm well aware that that's a pie-in-the-sky dream of a best case scenario, but it's also far more likely in the real world than Terminator.
I recently went to France skiing. Beforehand I made many searches via Goog across several hours, related to where I was going. I then demoed Google voice search to the wife on my phone, knowing what the likely outcome would be - she was worried about the rise of the machines.
"OK Google, find Tignes"
"OK Google, find Tigness"
"OK Google, find Tigguns"
"OK Google, find Teenyus"
"OK Google, fuck off"
(It's a bit hard to show what an Anglophone does to French whilst trying to talk to stupid)
I should point out that Tignes is nearly pronounced like "teens". Not once did the bloody thing show any inclination to bother looking at my "manual" search history.
Cheers
Jon
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