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huh... I've found that people who tend to describe their occupation as "knowledge work" are the most blind to the fact that white collar jobs are the first to g

huh... I've found that people who tend to describe their occupation as "knowledge work" are the most blind to the fact that white collar jobs are the first to get optimized away. Lawyers are going to have a really bad time after somebody manages to bridge NLP and formal logic. No, it won't result in a Lawyerbot-2000 - it will result in software that enables lawyers to do orders of magnitude more work of a higher quality. What do you think that does to a labor market? It shrinks it. That or people fill the labor glut with new, cheaper, lawsuits...

MichaelMoser123 5y ago
i don't think that people will ever fully trust an AI lawyer, given all the possible legal consquences of a misunderstanding between the AI and the client. You could literally go to jail because of a bug/misunderstanding due to an ambiguous term (this might make a good sci-fi story ...) But yes, getting some kind of legal opinion will probably be cheaper with an AI.
- sennight 5y ago
  Nor I, which is why I said so. A SaaS will pop up called "Co-chair" and that'll be that. It would definitely be a lot easier to trust than any of the black box neural networks we are all familiar with - as the field of formal logic is thousands of years old and pretty thoroughly explored. I used a SAT solver just last night to generate an exhaustive list of input values that result in a specific failure mode for some code I'm reverse engineering - I have no doubts about the answer the SAT solver provided. That definitely isn't the case with NN based solutions - which I trust to classify cat photos, but not much else.
Jeff_Brown 5y ago
Legal discovery and other "menial" law tasks are already quite automated.
- sennight 5y ago
  I wouldn't describe keyword search engines or cross reference managers as "quite automated" - so I would expect little market change from whatever LexisNexis is currently selling.
  - Jeff_Brown 5y ago
    I would -- I remember my mom as a lawyer having to schlep to the UCLA law library to photocopy stuff -- but current legal automation includes NLP at the level of individual clauses. https://www.suls.org.au/citations-blog/2020/9/25/natural-language-processing https://www.suls.org.au/citations-blog/2020/9/25/natural-lan...
    - sennight 5y ago
      Oof, as somebody who has studied the AI winter - that article hurt, suggesting that an unsupervised NN-centric approach is going to lead somewhere other than tool-assist... its the 1970s all over again. > I would Well you're going to have a problem describing actual automation when you encounter it. What would you call it when NLP results are fed into an inference engine that then actually executes actions - instead of just providing summarized search results? Super-duper automation?

MichaelMoser123 5y ago

i don't think that people will ever fully trust an AI lawyer, given all the possible legal consquences of a misunderstanding between the AI and the client. You could literally go to jail because of a bug/misunderstanding due to an ambiguous term (this might make a good sci-fi story ...) But yes, getting some kind of legal opinion will probably be cheaper with an AI.

sennight 5y ago
Nor I, which is why I said so. A SaaS will pop up called "Co-chair" and that'll be that. It would definitely be a lot easier to trust than any of the black box neural networks we are all familiar with - as the field of formal logic is thousands of years old and pretty thoroughly explored. I used a SAT solver just last night to generate an exhaustive list of input values that result in a specific failure mode for some code I'm reverse engineering - I have no doubts about the answer the SAT solver provided. That definitely isn't the case with NN based solutions - which I trust to classify cat photos, but not much else.

Jeff_Brown 5y ago

Legal discovery and other "menial" law tasks are already quite automated.

sennight 5y ago
I wouldn't describe keyword search engines or cross reference managers as "quite automated" - so I would expect little market change from whatever LexisNexis is currently selling.
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  I would -- I remember my mom as a lawyer having to schlep to the UCLA law library to photocopy stuff -- but current legal automation includes NLP at the level of individual clauses. https://www.suls.org.au/citations-blog/2020/9/25/natural-language-processing https://www.suls.org.au/citations-blog/2020/9/25/natural-lan...
  - sennight 5y ago
    Oof, as somebody who has studied the AI winter - that article hurt, suggesting that an unsupervised NN-centric approach is going to lead somewhere other than tool-assist... its the 1970s all over again. > I would Well you're going to have a problem describing actual automation when you encounter it. What would you call it when NLP results are fed into an inference engine that then actually executes actions - instead of just providing summarized search results? Super-duper automation?