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All the ink spilled hyping up the conflict between human vs. AI seems, well, fucking retarded to me. AI is going to kill a ton of people, and help a ton of people, just like the human-horse alliance did. It will definitely suck to suck. The question is, what polities will be able to use this new ally in a way congruent with their culture, and who will be destroyed by it? I’m worried that AI will play nice with censors and busybodies, and hope that it will help scientist and technologists build better humans and explore the stars. There is no way to get what I want without the risk of mean AI, and every day of delay means another day of growth for the rent-seekers. So pedal to the metal acceleration is a-OK with me, as the alternative of a decaying Pax Americanus w/nukes seems a loosing proposition.
I'm not really worried about AI because, regardless of how impressive it is, no one will trust it for a while. We're seeing the same thing now with self-driving cars. In 2016 everybody thought that there would be self-driving options available by 2023, and I mean true self-driving options where you can set your destination and take a nap in the back seat. We obviously aren't there yet, and it doesn't look like we're going to get there any time soon. Over the past few years, the biggest stories about self-driving technology have been about companies like Uber pulling out of the industry. So when people talk about AI replacing lawyers I laugh because if the public doesn't trust self-driving vehicles then there's no way that the legal industry will trust AI to write pleadings for it. There's a chicken-egg problem where the only way I'd trust an AI to have researched an issue thoroughly is if I go back and independently verify that it has done so enough times that I'm convinced that it isn't missing anything I would have found myself. But I'm not going to pay for the work to be done twice. I'm sure some third-parties (probably those promoting the technology) will have marketing materials with a ton of examples and statistics but everyone assumes those are best cases and in high-stakes law no one is trusting that they can guarantee anything.
At the firm I used to work at we regularly had to go through several-thousand page documents looking for one name or one parcel number in the exhibits. These were all in PDFs, and sometimes I knew that they had what I was looking for, just not where, and sometimes I didn't, so I'd OCR the documents in Acrobat and search for what I was looking for. We later got a memo from the partner in charge of our division saying not to trust OCR and to do everything manually because they didn't trust it and the docs were taking up too much space on our server. I still OCR'd stuff because if I found what I was looking for it saved a lot of time, but most people just quit doing so after that, and OCR'd documents got deleted from the server. At the same firm one client wanted information we normally put in a spreadsheet in narrative form. One of the guys wrote a macro to automate the process and create a Word document. This wasn't perfect but with some manual editing it significantly sped up the time it took to do this. New boss comes in, sees that it isn't perfect, and doesn't even bother to tell the new hires that the macro existed because she felt it was easier to do it manually from scratch. I will say that I suspect that part of it was that the client had a lot of unreasonable requests and the firm wanted to rub it in a bit by making sure that they got soaked in the billing, but they also spent a lot of time cultivating that client and wanted to keep them, so who knows.
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