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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32182 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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Interesting, though I’d say probably not the right thread.

I’m not hugely interested in the pace of AI advancement for now. Superhuman intelligence at the point where things just get ‘solved’ will be a fun step, but for me as soon as the potential of agents became clear (which was early in the GPT 3 era) the writing was on the wall. Everything now is just efficiency, the pathway had been clear for the last couple of years, we’re just waiting for the world to realize what’s just happened.

For the past almost two years I've been taking small steps to arrange my life for a 'soft landing' in the event my job gets instantly obliterated when the AI that can do it better comes out.

I stand by this advice from just over 2 years ago, where I said:

My honest bet is that any student currently in their first year of Law School will be unable to compete with AI legal services by the time they graduate. Certainly not on cost. The AI didn't incur 5-6 figure loans for it's legal training.

Put another way, the AI will be as competent/capable as a first-year associate at a law firm inside 3 years.

A student who was a first year law student in December 2022 will be in the third and final year now, graduating soon. They may have some runway left to get a job before the AIttorney arrives, but do we want to bet that AI tools that can outperform them across the board won't be here by December 2025?

I'm still keeping an eye out for signs of downward pressure on new attorney salaries.

The Rumblings have begun in earnest

99% of all 'purely' knowledge-based work is on the chopping block.

Signed:

A practicing attorney who semi-regularly consults ChatGPT to get my bearings when dealing with a unique legal issue.

Interesting, though I’d say probably not the right thread.

I have a meta question: what is up with people putting AI news in the culture war thread? It's not just @self_made_human by any means, but I have no idea why the topics keep getting posted here. It's not really culture war in any way, so shouldn't they get their own threads?

Although not "culture war" in the traditional left vs right sense, the development of AGI still has wide-reaching cultural, political, and ideological implications. The more theoretical/philosophical AI posts are a pretty natural fit for the CW thread. News items about more specific/incremental AI advances maybe not so much, but starting with the first ChatGPT there was a period where there was a lot of interest in AI on TheMotte and people got used to talking about it in the CW thread, so, it just kind of stuck.

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