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The article doesn't seem to take his train of thought quite far enough. If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then wh

• checker 4mo ago
  I agree in the short term. But in the long term, the owners of the compute will become disgustingly rich without a wealth tax, nationalization, or local AI becoming competitive and ubiquitous. There are still problems to solve; the alternative is an absolute oligarchy.
  • momoschili 4mo ago
    what do you mean short term? We aren't even in the short term yet (has the AI revolution truly begun?) and the owners of compute are already disgustingly rich.
    • checker 4mo ago
      I agreed that AI will enable entrepreneurship but yes everyone will continue to lose ground to the owners of compute.
  • mountainriver 4mo ago
    Agree, the most important thing we can possibly do is enforce collectively owned compute This is why companies like Anthropic are so scary, they believe AI should be controlled by them alone
• bang1a 4mo ago
  By your logic, aren't the entreprenuers also middlemen?
  • 5701652400 4mo ago
    straight to the point. users will do it themselves, thanks to God-like Google Gemini super-app that does everything and owns whole internet.
• confidantlake 4mo ago
  Law firms are useful because they have connections to the prosecution and judges. You can't just open up a law firm without that.
• BoneShard 4mo ago
  but just imagine the brave new world, where a law firm has super-duper-frontier model and you're trying to argue with it in a court with your latest best local oss model (only 6 month behind the bestests ones).
  • thesuavefactor 4mo ago
    Interestingly, I have a conflict with my municipality. I fed the articles of law and their arguments of why and how they apply to notebooklm and asked it for fallacies. It not only gave me the fallacies in their reasoning, but also an excellent counter argument and motivation why they are interpreting this law incorrectly. The result is now that they are handing over the entire case to an independent third party to evaluate which interpretation is valid.
  • justinclift 4mo ago
    So, best make sure the court has a significant internet outage on the day your case is scheduled, while you have your model running in your pocket? :)
  • nm980 4mo ago
    This isn't any different than paying more for a better lawyer with a lighter caseload instead of using a public defender
• peonicles 4mo ago
  We can take your train of thought further still. If AI ever becomes super good at lawyering, why would we even need law firms and lawyers at all? We could feed legislation and constitution into the model and have it argue against other lawyer bots in court in front of a judge bot.
  • patrickk 4mo ago
    Brand value of the ‘prestigious’ law firms will still count for something in the minds of C suite executives (who of course will ensure they themselves are not trampled on by AI). The same dynamic will likely happen with high-powered consulting, big 4 audit/accounting firms and so on, even if inside those companies it’s just a shell of its former self.
  • close04 4mo ago
    Not buying the judge not part. A human being judged by a non-human will be very far in the future. Bots can’t be held accountable. It’s also an “us vs. them”, for some people it’s hard to accept being judged by a different gender, ethnicity, etc. A bot telling you to go to prison? Tough sell.
    • velik_m 4mo ago
      I can easily see a two tiered justice: a human judge for those who can afford it, and AI judge for rest of us plebs.
      • jsrcout 4mo ago
        Dammit, another horrifying yet entirely realistic near-future scenario to keep me up at night.
    • Angelore 4mo ago
      >Bots can’t be held accountable Without being too much of a downer, neither can judges in most places. Source: personal experience in a country with "telephone law".
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• kajaktum 4mo ago
  You realize that the limit of this is that the only people worth existing is the people with capital? > I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving. Why do I need to buy products/services from this startups when I can just reverse engineer their product and use all my capital to make them?
  • noopprod 4mo ago
    > only people worth existing is the people with capital? replying to this with my thoughts IMO The missing link is that, as long as humans still have political power, that is the basis of their economic power under the new system. The reason is that it is a continuation of the dynamic we see now in western decadence - politicians bribe the populace for votes. So on one side you have the market for political support, balanced with the market for capitalist robot operations, on either side of the political arena.
    • chadgpt3 4mo ago
      Historically when people had no power they held violent riots to reassert that they do. Happened as recently as Jan 6 2021 (unsuccessfully that time).
      • noopprod 4mo ago
        of course. nice name btw
    • patentatt 4mo ago
      What exactly do you mean by “politicians bribe the populace for votes” ?
      • noopprod 4mo ago
        I mean there is pressure on democratic governments to increase benefits - welfare, disability, retirement etc, spending, beyond a sustainable amount. (However if AI delivers massive productivity gains its whats going to keep humans in the game (our political power))
• baddash 4mo ago
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• thisisit 4mo ago
  Here's another train of thought because you don't seem to understand how incentives or even lawyering works. > then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market? Your thinking is similar to the someone saying you can use LLMs to "research" stock market edges. The rub lies in knowing what research to do and what inputs to provide. Big law firms are not big because they create similar outputs and that can be done using AI. They are "big" because they have connections and also know how to create better outputs. Still to your point: > I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving. If this was true then what you are saying is every thing is going to be commoditized due to AI. There is no quality difference. That will drive prices down in the short term and in the long term people will form cliques like "Forum for AI enabled lawyers" or something similar to OECD and drive prices up. Thereby delivering even lesser value for increased cost. Enshittification at its finest. Not exactly the utopia you seem to be picturing.
  • chrinic6391 4mo ago
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• palmotea 4mo ago
  > If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market? Money. They won't have the money to pay for the tokens, or the best models, because they'll be unemployed. They also won't have the connections to get the clients. When you're playing a game of "who has the best capital," the scrappy underdog worker with vastly less won't win. The idea that making the economy even more capital intensive will some how equalize things is an insane fantasy only a software engineer could swallow.
  • unusualmonkey 4mo ago
    Sorry that's no realistic. People start businesses, including law firms, all the time with little to no capital. Assuming token costs will be prohibitive assumes: A) tokens will be really expensive and B) you need to fund tokens before you have revenue. Your asserting AI makes the economy more capital intensive, when I think you'll see in practice it's the opposite.
    • palmotea 4mo ago
      > Sorry that's no realistic. People start businesses, including law firms, all the time with little to no capital. You're clinging past: what you is true when human capital counts for something, but what happens when it doesn't? Where the party who can spend the most tokens on the case wins (or has a much greater chance of success)? Law might not be the best example of that, but (under current trends) a lot of areas will be. > Your asserting AI makes the economy more capital intensive, when I think you'll see in practice it's the opposite. You're claiming AI will make the economy more labor intensive? Huh?
      • qsera 4mo ago
        > what happens when it doesn't? It will never happen. Capitalism works when consumers can choose the best service provider. When there is only one universal service provide (AI), behind various "fronts", it would be catastrophic. And all the consumers lose catastrophically. So there should be at least some human component to differentiate between the various "AI" providers.
• NothingAboutAny 4mo ago
  > I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. why would anyone pay anyone else for anything when they could just get an AI to do it? any service would now be worthless, there will be people with hardware and people without. 3 futures: one where the hardware is shared. one where it is not. one where the first person with enough of it kills everyone else.
  • RandomLensman 4mo ago
    Why would everyone want to do everything themselves? No comparative advantage at all and infinitely capable robots?
    • DangitBobby 4mo ago
      The entire discussion is predicated on the arrival of an AI future where AI can do any human labor at incredibly low costs and all but eliminating the value of human expertise. If getting something done resembles "doing everything themselves" then that future did not arrive.
      • RandomLensman 4mo ago
        The AI would solve all your problems without even needed to prompted in any way?
      • hannasanarion 4mo ago
        The "incredibly low costs" part is part of the classic AI discussion, but it's not part of this AI discussion. The article makes clear, it is describing not a hypothetical future trend, but the trend that we are seeing today, where you don't actually get that much more productivity by replacing people with today's AI, you actually probably lose more than a bit, but it's still a good deal for business anyway, because they would rather pay AI companies than people about the same amount of money to do about the same amount of work.
• freefaler 4mo ago
  The price of their work will go down and it might not be economical to do it at all. Theirs skills (as also many IT skills) will not be needed at that scale. In the same way as typing on a typewriter was a skill that gave economic opportunity not so long time ago. Now everything is an email and part of it is speech to text. When something becomes a commodity, the skilled providers need to find something new to sell on the market. About the law firms, part of the job of a law firm is to give the corporate employee a "guarantee" that he won't be held accountable for doing something legally stupid. So a new lawyer is at great disadvantage if he don't have the contact he has build trust with. From a freind's law company with 50+ lawyers I know that junior lawyers fresh from uni need at least 4-5 years to build their client base. Then, they can leave and start their own taking part of that client base with them. This limits the number of people who can start their own company and most of them won't risk it in the age of AI, because it will be sales and marketing that will feed them, not their legal wizardry, especially when tasks like "check this agreement" won't be billed at the current insane rates.
  • chadgpt3 4mo ago
    Great example. Typewriter skill is computer typing skill. You no longer have to return the carriage. The typing is the same. It's not obsolete.
  • patentatt 4mo ago
    Law firms are already limited by sales and marketing, and I believe the concept of ‘legal wizardry’ is misplaced. There’s almost nothing one law firm can do that another couldn’t do just as well. The only thing clients want are the ‘you don’t get fired for buying IBM’ factor and asking ‘how high’ when they say jump. The first is all based on cultivating an image and that’s just marketing and sales, and the second is just pure workaholic-fueled hustle.
    • freefaler 4mo ago
      The wizardry is not in knowing the law or the case law, especially in commercial law it's mostly selling their experience because the have seen it all before and if they're good they'll show you the ways you can get abused by the other party. History of negotiations and deals is the leverage they provide.
• mrtksn 4mo ago
  For some reason AI is able to replace engineers, doctors, lawyers but can do CEO’s and PR specialists. (!) Every time these AI discussions happen, it’s my first thought, they even talk about the 1 person billion $ company concept but for some reason it’s never the CEO’s replaced and it’s never their industry taken over by the 1 person unicorn. It’s very weird, it’s just obvious that once you are made redundant you just fill the gaps with AI and become the competitor. Maybe they imagine that they have the X factor(unlike those engineers or musicians that are being replaced) and the people they laid off were low tier players anyway. It simply doesn’t compute. The only possible way is to AI companies steal all the businesses of everyone and then unless they find a way to run a system where everyone is happy enough and occupied the “permanent underclass” overruns the AI folks and it becomes a public domain and the concept of intellectual property ownership disappears and other forces like vanity take over and after some conflict a brand new society emerges that runs like a cult with self imposed limits so that they can maintain a structure and healthy competition.
• throwawayqqq11 4mo ago
  The big picture can be extended to all economic branches, where steady competition drives down profit margins to near zero, like it is the case for eg. grocery chains already. Functioning markets are solving distribution problems and maybe, some day we will even consider something like algorithmic/HF trading not as a margin siphon but as a (public) service of automated distribution. The bigger picture has to go beyond the How/Who into the the Why/When, which opens up the end conditions of profit driven enterprise and capitalism itself.
• qsera 4mo ago
  > what's stopping all those people you fired.. Reputation, (or lack of it) and the big clients that come with it. Isn't that obvious?
• 5701652400 4mo ago
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• deleted 4mo ago
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• suncemoje 4mo ago
  > I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming I foresee Claude etc being able to do much of that on a self-serve basis. The entrepreneurship you mention to me looks exactly opposite to what you are describing - a middleman between the customer and the product, which is offered by a third party. In my mind that’s why they launched this deployment company for example, to do just that in house as well
• cvwright 4mo ago
  The best early example of this is that Anthropic is already eating the lunch of all the new “AI security audit” companies. And they were only a few years old. Those guys certainly thought they were being novel and creative, using AI to disrupt an expensive and labor intensive business model. But now with Claude Security, their own market share is going to be gobbled up before they can even get established.
• Earw0rm 4mo ago
  In that scenario, the AI owners become rentiers - able to charge as much as the market will bear for brokerage - and everyone else gets to offer their services via said brokerages, which charge the customer the most they can bear, and pay the worker the least. Any economy of scale - which is, in a way, what allows knowledge economies to exist at all - will accrue to the middleman. Good news for those able to master manual, craft skills to a degree most cannot. High-end tradespeople, specialist installation technicians and so on. Bad news for everyone else besides rentiers.
• Eextra953 4mo ago
  Lawyers will be fine they will work with legislators to make it illegal for AI to practice law. Then, even if the lawyers job is mostly presenting the work of a legal AI, they will still be employed. Other knowledge workers will need to wisen up and do the same. Edit: same for any profession that requires professional accreditation: lawyers, doctors, cpas, professional engineers, etc.
• MisterTea 4mo ago
  > I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving. What services would those be? You already stated the AI will eliminate the need for companies in many areas so I'm not sure how this fits in with that statement.
• root_axis 4mo ago
  Yeah... Take it even one step further, why would AI companies even sell access at all? They could just run competitor firms directly themselves, and that outcome is really the only way they can ever hope to make ROI, so for sure they'll do it if it ever becomes possible.
• peder 4mo ago
  Exactly right, it's Porter's Five Forces with Threats of Substitutes and Threats of New Entrants, which means that margins will be compressed massively, which means that being a lawyer will often mean lower wages. The p99() of lawyer wages will probably decline, but the max() will likely increase for the niches that are not adequately covered by AI use cases.
• lumost 4mo ago
  The author’s implied argument is that capital control’s the entrepreneurship game already. There is only 1 top law firm, financiers of law firms have no interest in starting a race to the bottom. Foundation model labs will take a significant portion of the value, the remainder will be captured by entrenched monopolies.
• majormajor 4mo ago
  > I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving. Why doesn't this extend one step further? Many of those "service provider" people no longer are needed? If you're a consultant for domain X, and you used to work at Big Consulting, and they fire you to replace you with AI... soon the customer will hire neither your new provider, or Big Consulting, and just use AI directly, if it's that good. Certain professions have legal/regulatory protections, but thesis (a) "entrepreneurs replace big incumbent service providers" doesn't seem necessarily more stable compared to thesis (b) "the people who need the knowledge have their AI do it themselves". In order for (a) to be true without (b), the AI tools themselves have to be good enough to make the concentration of specialized knowledge and institutional expertise/history no longer critical; but not good enough that the would-be-entreprenurial-middleman's own specialized knowledge can't also be replaced.
  • projectazorian 4mo ago
    > If you're a consultant for domain X, and you used to work at Big Consulting, and they fire you to replace you with AI... soon the customer will hire neither your new provider, or Big Consulting, and just use AI directly, if it's that good. Most consulting is not some flashy 25 year old Ivy grad putting together a slide deck that says “fire people,” it usually involves either gathering (or providing) extensive domain knowledge much of which is in forms not legible to AI (or at least in forms that can’t be encapsulated at a context level that doesn’t cause unacceptable quality drops.) Often there are compliance mandates involved that have real teeth. So again I think there will still be plenty of humans involved.
• projectazorian 4mo ago
  > If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market? And ultimately, if AI gets to be so good that it can competently do a lawyer's job, what reason do big law firms even have to exist? Who is going to hire them if they can just hire AI? The companies that are rushing so hard to replace their workers don't realise that AI is eventually going to replace them too. Lawyers will be fine IMO, they’re a government protected guild whose key outputs have to be human certified, and where error has real consequences + can threaten licensure or lead to civil/criminal liability in the worst cases. Not to mention that AI dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for filing lawsuits. Courts are already being inundated by pro se filings, mostly from nutters as usual, but some of which will have real merit. And entrepreneurial litigators will eventually figure out how to harness AI properly, some probably already have. All of those lawsuits will require lawyers to handle them. And this is without getting into the complex IP issues that AI raises. I’d say that there might be some short term dislocation but demand for lawyers is about to go up, not down. Paralegals without specialized knowledge may be in for a hard time though.
• oleggromov 4mo ago
  > what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies This is beyond naive. We've got plenty of successful businesses in front of our eyes, what makes any of us work for them instead of starting competition? Maybe lack of appetite for risk, lack of means to take on some substantial amount of it, lack of perfect timing, bills, children and parents to support, accumulated momentum in another profession and no skills to run a business, no meaningful connections? The list goes on and on and to think you could just start a business regardless of your circumstances, and even more so, try to make this hypothetical sound as an answer to the very real issue of increasing job insecurity is just pure malice.
• keeda 4mo ago
  > I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving. Yes, and there is already preliminary data showing this trend: https://news.linkedin.com/2025/breaking-the-trend--small-business-creation-jumps-69--as-entrepr https://news.linkedin.com/2025/breaking-the-trend--small-bus...
• importantbrian 4mo ago
  I recently had a similar discussion with my BIL who owns a construction business. He was saying he was glad he didn't have to worry about AI, because even if it automated everything about the business he'd still own it. I was like not so fast. In that situation access to capitol to pay for compute is going to be how businesses compete. Are you confident you're going to be able to have enough capitol to out compete the other businesses in your industry? Not to mention if AI and robotics get good enough why would I need to hire any construction company, let alone yours?