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Notes -
I came of age right as the Internet was taking off. But I've started watching classic movies and TV and I think the "information at my fingertips" effect is something that has happened so gradually I don't think we really appreciate it's impact fully, even pre-LLM. One recent TV episode from the '90s had one character tell another to travel to the state capital and find and photocopy dead-tree legal references, which was expected to take a day. My world today is radically different in a number of ways:
State laws are pretty easily accessible via the internet. I'm not sure how the minutia of laws were well-known back then. Are our laws themselves different (or enforced differently) because the lay public can be expected to review, say, health code requirements for a restaurant?
Computerized text is much more readily searchable. If I have a very specific question, I can find key words with ctrl-f rather than depending on a precompiled index. The amount of information I need to keep in my brain is no longer things like exact quotes, just enough to find the important bits back quickly. The computer already put a bunch of white-collar workers out of jobs, just gradually: nobody needs an army of accountants with calculators to crunch quarterly reports. Or humans employed to manually compute solutions to math problems.
The Internet is now readily accessible on-the-go. Pre-iPhone (or maybe Blackberry), Internet resources required (I remember this) finding a computer to access. So the Internet couldn't easily settle arguments in real conversation. The vibe is different, and at least in my circles, it seems like the expectation of precision in claims is much higher. IRL political arguments didn't go straight to citing specific claims quite the same way.
I sometimes feel overwhelmed trying to grasp the scope of the changes even within my own lifetime, and I find myself wondering things like what my grandfather did day-to-day as an engineer. These days it's mostly a desk job for me, but I don't even know what I'd be expected to do if you took away my computer: it'd be such a different world.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question, but laws are organized into books that are indexed. You look up the relevant statute, search for the right section, and then read a few paragraphs describing the law. If you need to know the details of case lawyer, you consult a lawyer. They go to law school and read relevant cases to know how judges are likely to rule on similar future cases.
You still need lawyers to do this because ctrl-f doesn't return a list of all the relevant legal principles from all the relevant cases.
There also has been a massive explosion in the number and complexity of laws since the word processor was invented.
This is, I think, the answer I was looking for. Ctrl-F doesn't find everything (I've had to search non-indexed dead-tree books before), but it's a huge force multiplier.
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