Eventually, somebody will write bots to deal with this robotic bureaucracy and it will be matter of how much licenses and CPU power you have to negotiate a better deal. Essentially, it will be like rich people nowadays solve issues between themselves using lawers.
Can't wait till I have to pay a lawyer $500/hr to turn around and ask a bot what to do.
Given the disproportionate amount of lawyers in any given legislature, never mind the make-up of judges, I can only imagine that a legal stranglehold insulating lawyers from the threat of AI will be one of, if not the, first bit of AI protectionist legislation.
> Law firm drafts letter of complaint, lawyer skims it for 30 seconds.
> Law firm threatens to sue 100,000+ times across 50 jurisdictions unless company settles all pending cases at 10% premium of expected outcome.
> You receive payment minus $2 for legal expenses.
I actually suspect that automating both sides of that exchange will shift the balance of power in favor of consumers, since companies already have a massive amount of liability they're ignoring because it's difficult to extract payment over. If you could automate that process, especially by filing a distinct case for every contract violation or legal issue they refused to honor, I suspect many companies would collapse.
If lawyer costs fall to the point where you can automate the suits over such business contract violations, I expect you'd have the ability to legal DDoS a bunch of abusive companies into submission.
This already happens. It's actually bureaucracy, but it's rarely called that.
Try dealing with YouTube after a fraudulent copyright strike, or getting money from Amazon or PayPal after your account has been suspended for an arbitrary reason.
AI has the potential to automate bureaucratic corporate hostility and indifference to weaponised levels.
As the AI gets better people will trust it with more and more kinds of cases and with increased complexity. If people want to pay for a real licensed lawyer they are a still able to do so.
It's naive to think that a company would develop an AI capable of beating a lawyer in court and then sell it cheaply to poor people to beat traffic tickets. If anyone ever manages to develop an AI that is actually capable of replacing a lawyer, it will be priced way, way out of reach of those people. It will be sold to giant corporations so that they can spend $500k on licence fees rather than $1 million on legal fees. (And unless those corporations can get indemnities from the software vendor backed by personal guarantees they'd still be getting a raw deal.)
These people are being sold snake oil. Cheap snake oil, maybe, but snake oil nonetheless.
An excellent dystopian story. One thing I'd add to your prediction is that the complexity of laws will increase massively because computers will be interpreting the law. There won't be an incentive to keep it simple enough for a human to understand. The same thing has been happening with taxes -- since most people and businesses use tax programs, there is no push back on the complexity of taxation rules. In fact, companies that make tax preparation software lobby to keep the complexity.
Another thing I'd add is that Human Resources departments at companies and governments will become even powerful than they already are (because everyone is suing everyone).
What's interesting about this is once you can an AI that is a legal representative-- you can just spin up thousands or millions of them and start suing people for everything. Like legal spamming...
It is getting clearer by the day that humans will use AI for laws written for humans. And this will cause a lot of grief for the people on whom these laws are imposed.
Why would powerful people want to prevent lawyers from being replaced by AI? Wouldn't they rather not pay for expensive lawyers too? Or are you saying they somehow like paying for lawyers?
It's going to be the exact same issue for "AI lawyers", "AI doctors", they're going to fuck up at some point, maybe 1% cases, maybe 0.001% cases, but when it will happen it's going to be a nightmare in term of liability
Unless signing up to these services will automatically wave your rights somewhere down in the 5000 page EULA you won't read.
If the law were automated how would the wealthy get preferential treatment? Entering the legal system rich vs entering the legal system poor are two entirely different things. Maybe you will have to pay for compute cycles or additional law modules or something like that. ...I tend to think control over the law needs to be arrested from human hands if we want a fair system. But people don't want a fair system. They want a system that benefits them. I wonder if AI in the legal system will just be an internal revolution.
Lawyers control government, at least in the U.S. Expect laws banning or severely restricting the use of AI in the legal field soon. I expect arguments will range from the dangers of ineffective counsel to "but think of the children" - whatever helps them protect their monopoly.
At some point computers will be able to provide better, cheaper, and faster legal advice than humans. No human can fit all of the law in their head, and don't always offer the 100% accurate advice. Not everyone can afford a lawyer.
They are at risk; the ones that use AI will remove the ones that don’t in the end. The average lawyer does very little already; last week I had some papers that I needed to be checked legally; gpt4 found some issues that the expensive lawyer overlooked. Not big issues but issues. And this document was not in English either. It explained the issues in English, it provided a lot of text which the lawyer did not. But they did spend (assuming they didn’t lie) 3 hours and some minutes on them; if they can do this with AI in 15-30 minutes, which they can (it is enough time to recognise if it’s hallucinating), then they can put 3-4 lawyers out of a job by lowering prices. And that’s just using gpt as tool, not as the primary driver; just to speed up the work.
I don’t think it would destroy jobs for anything high profile (including programmers), but the grunts is a different story. If the secretary or, for instance, nurse, can feed through info and the ‘head’ lawyer/doctor of the practice only has to sign off on the result, the license is not an issue.
Not there yet, but can’t see this as avoidable anymore.
The Machine will not be able to easily go to court in any jurisdiction and fight for its own ownership. If the machine is producing any real value, human lawyers will untangle the mess and a human will take ownership.
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