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To be clear, while journalists often write hyperbolic headlines about how Atrium is replacing lawyers with AI, what we are really doing is building tools that e

by justin 8y ago

To be clear, while journalists often write hyperbolic headlines about how Atrium is replacing lawyers with AI, what we are really doing is building tools that empower and enable lawyers (by automating the crank turning work and freeing legal professionals up to focus on what they like doing, which is advising clients). When we were selling Twitch, we didn't want an AI lawyer, Uber for lawyers, a marketplace of lawyers, or workflow software for selling your company. We wanted an M&A attorney with years of experience selling multi-billion dollar deals to tell us that everything we were doing was right. This is the philosophy we're taking to Atrium, which is the best clients will go where the best lawyers go, and the best lawyers will go where they are empowered and life is better :). More broadly, technology has always displaced humans and whether we should ramp taxes on capital is largely dependent on the distribution of ownership of that technology. We are probably swinging back towards robber-baron levels of value creation accruing to capital, and so I predict taxes to increase in the medium term.

mrnobody_67 8y ago
Fact is, the majority of jobs are "crank work". Whether sewing shirts, flipping burgers, making coffee or, in this case, reviewing NDAs or other mundane agreements. I'd argue there isn't simply enough "work that people like doing" to give everybody full-time jobs with all this automation. Nobody in their right might would do boring/uninteresting work if a better option was available to them -- including lawyers.
- justin 8y ago
  In 1800, 83% of American jobs were in agriculture. Now it is 2%, not because people eat less per capita but because of increased technology. We have invented a lot of stuff for those people who would have been farmers to do: advertising, lawyering, flipping burgers, programming, etc Many of the jobs we invented are crank-turning jobs (like most ag jobs were previously). The process of creative destruction is that the most crank-turning of them will be automated and we will invent new and innovative cranks to turn! For example: full time Twitch broadcaster. We are very good at making up new work for people.
  - quadcore 8y ago
    In 1800, 83% of American jobs were in agriculture. Now it is 2% [...] We are very good at making up new work for people. We've been over the past 200 years. Small data set though.

by justin 8y ago

mrnobody_67 8y ago

Fact is, the majority of jobs are "crank work". Whether sewing shirts, flipping burgers, making coffee or, in this case, reviewing NDAs or other mundane agreements. I'd argue there isn't simply enough "work that people like doing" to give everybody full-time jobs with all this automation. Nobody in their right might would do boring/uninteresting work if a better option was available to them -- including lawyers.

justin 8y ago
In 1800, 83% of American jobs were in agriculture. Now it is 2%, not because people eat less per capita but because of increased technology. We have invented a lot of stuff for those people who would have been farmers to do: advertising, lawyering, flipping burgers, programming, etc Many of the jobs we invented are crank-turning jobs (like most ag jobs were previously). The process of creative destruction is that the most crank-turning of them will be automated and we will invent new and innovative cranks to turn! For example: full time Twitch broadcaster. We are very good at making up new work for people.
- quadcore 8y ago
  In 1800, 83% of American jobs were in agriculture. Now it is 2% [...] We are very good at making up new work for people. We've been over the past 200 years. Small data set though.