4 ms·

Right about time. I had to deal with several immigration lawyers and it struck my mind how simple and small their decision tree is. A simple deviation from a st

by shadow0 11y ago

Right about time. I had to deal with several immigration lawyers and it struck my mind how simple and small their decision tree is. A simple deviation from a standard case makes them want to "check and get back" which they probably do mostly by asking their colleagues.

saryant 11y ago
Isn't that what you would expect? Most cases fit within a predictable mold, on others they consult with the rest of their firm (or case law, journals—whatever else it is lawyers consult). Why would that be a bad thing?
- TheSoftwareGuy 11y ago
  It isn't, and I don't think shadow0 thinks it is either. The point I think he's trying to make is that making an AI to do their job for them would not be difficult
  - shadow0 11y ago
    Yup, exactly this.
- chii 11y ago
  it's not bad per se, but the expense doesn't seem to be justified. Imagine if an expert system did the work instead, at a fraction of the cost!
  - stretchwithme 11y ago
    Should be less than a penny for many things, once all the patents expires. Of course, we still may be paying a person to do a reality check on what a computer comes up with. The same way we will pay a doctor to confirm that, yes indeed, that leg has to come off.
- bpchaps 11y ago
  False dichotomy territory there. I had to deal with immigration lawyers for a friend about 2 years ago after deferred action took place. She was born in Mexico, but her parents came over here shortly after she was born. With deferred action, if you have a high school degree, are younger than 35, never left the US after you originally arrived here here and don't have anything on your "record" (which is a fuzzy thing in itself), you get a work permit with an SSN. Now.. my friend is the most organized person you'll ever meet. For whatever reason, she decided to keep all of her homework, documents, mail, etc from high school 8 years prior. She never left the US, got mostly As, was good standing on jrotc. As a small anecdote, she also just got top employee award at a thousand person company without even working there for a year. Really, she was the kind of person that should have had a little bit of wiggle room. Nope. She had a two month period of time that she couldn't find any documents from right after high school. They rejected her on the basis that she could have left the US at that time. It took 6 weeks to get a letter stating that. She immediately found some random mail and went through the whole process again. She got accepted, but it took another 6 weeks to get confirmation. THEN.. she had to 2 months to go to the SSN offices specially prepared for the "high traffic" where we were the only ones there, along with about 20 staff. Oh, and then her brother who's been pulled over for speeding multiple times, dropped out of high school (he got his GED in fairness)... got a work permit with extreme ease. Hell, he even filed late without even using a lawyer. Rant over, but you get the point. It's a frustrating process where there's a mold, but it's an ineffective baked-shit mold. Edit: I helped another friend out who had a somewhat uncommon situation that let her get a greencard without going through the usual process. When DHS said she was good to go, the SSN told us it was "impossible to input the alien number" because it didn't have the correct amount of digits and couldn't be typed in their system. We were told to fill out a form that would take 6 weeks to process. DHS and the SSN office both refused to work with each other and we weren't allowed to use cell phones in the building. When we tried again about a month later, the person at the counter gave her an SSN on the spot without any issue. Frustrating.
- shadow0 11y ago
  I wasn't saying it's a bad thing. It just seems like a job that should be fairly simple to replace once AI reached certain level. A lot of lawyers seem to be dealing with very few types of standard cases for which they repeat the same routine and there is no any 'problem solving' involved when you really need a high level of expertise. That's like if you were a programmer and you had to develop the same kind of applications over and over again and when you could basically copy/paste most of your code from the previous projects.
- Turing_Machine 11y ago
  Yeah, I would imagine that a large percentage of being a good lawyer is being able to recognize when a particular case is not a good candidate for routine handling. Same with doctors. On the surface, a case might be a good candidate for sending the patient home with aspirin (or whatever). Being able to recognize the unusual cases when that's not appropriate is where the real skill comes in. Sometimes, of course, both doctors and lawyers screw up on this.
yetanotheracc 11y ago
Same with medical professionals

by shadow0 11y ago

saryant 11y ago

Isn't that what you would expect? Most cases fit within a predictable mold, on others they consult with the rest of their firm (or case law, journals—whatever else it is lawyers consult). Why would that be a bad thing?

TheSoftwareGuy 11y ago
It isn't, and I don't think shadow0 thinks it is either. The point I think he's trying to make is that making an AI to do their job for them would not be difficult
- shadow0 11y ago
  Yup, exactly this.
chii 11y ago
it's not bad per se, but the expense doesn't seem to be justified. Imagine if an expert system did the work instead, at a fraction of the cost!
- stretchwithme 11y ago
  Should be less than a penny for many things, once all the patents expires. Of course, we still may be paying a person to do a reality check on what a computer comes up with. The same way we will pay a doctor to confirm that, yes indeed, that leg has to come off.
bpchaps 11y ago
False dichotomy territory there. I had to deal with immigration lawyers for a friend about 2 years ago after deferred action took place. She was born in Mexico, but her parents came over here shortly after she was born. With deferred action, if you have a high school degree, are younger than 35, never left the US after you originally arrived here here and don't have anything on your "record" (which is a fuzzy thing in itself), you get a work permit with an SSN. Now.. my friend is the most organized person you'll ever meet. For whatever reason, she decided to keep all of her homework, documents, mail, etc from high school 8 years prior. She never left the US, got mostly As, was good standing on jrotc. As a small anecdote, she also just got top employee award at a thousand person company without even working there for a year. Really, she was the kind of person that should have had a little bit of wiggle room. Nope. She had a two month period of time that she couldn't find any documents from right after high school. They rejected her on the basis that she could have left the US at that time. It took 6 weeks to get a letter stating that. She immediately found some random mail and went through the whole process again. She got accepted, but it took another 6 weeks to get confirmation. THEN.. she had to 2 months to go to the SSN offices specially prepared for the "high traffic" where we were the only ones there, along with about 20 staff. Oh, and then her brother who's been pulled over for speeding multiple times, dropped out of high school (he got his GED in fairness)... got a work permit with extreme ease. Hell, he even filed late without even using a lawyer. Rant over, but you get the point. It's a frustrating process where there's a mold, but it's an ineffective baked-shit mold. Edit: I helped another friend out who had a somewhat uncommon situation that let her get a greencard without going through the usual process. When DHS said she was good to go, the SSN told us it was "impossible to input the alien number" because it didn't have the correct amount of digits and couldn't be typed in their system. We were told to fill out a form that would take 6 weeks to process. DHS and the SSN office both refused to work with each other and we weren't allowed to use cell phones in the building. When we tried again about a month later, the person at the counter gave her an SSN on the spot without any issue. Frustrating.
shadow0 11y ago
I wasn't saying it's a bad thing. It just seems like a job that should be fairly simple to replace once AI reached certain level. A lot of lawyers seem to be dealing with very few types of standard cases for which they repeat the same routine and there is no any 'problem solving' involved when you really need a high level of expertise. That's like if you were a programmer and you had to develop the same kind of applications over and over again and when you could basically copy/paste most of your code from the previous projects.
Turing_Machine 11y ago
Yeah, I would imagine that a large percentage of being a good lawyer is being able to recognize when a particular case is not a good candidate for routine handling. Same with doctors. On the surface, a case might be a good candidate for sending the patient home with aspirin (or whatever). Being able to recognize the unusual cases when that's not appropriate is where the real skill comes in. Sometimes, of course, both doctors and lawyers screw up on this.

yetanotheracc 11y ago

Same with medical professionals