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Also I noticed tough that we don't have as many actual replacements of service or professionals as the article suggested. Robots are not replacing surgeons. T

Also I noticed tough that we don't have as many actual replacements of service or professionals as the article suggested. Robots are not replacing surgeons. They are being used by surgeons. You can't replace a lawyer with software either. These are tools for the professions and service providers, not the professionals themselves. The risk I think is that this extra complexity may pose problems down the road due to automation paradoxes and so forth.

foobarian 13y ago
You can't replace a lawyer with software either. Maybe not one-for-one, but one lawyer with a state of the art data mining warehouse can probably do the job that used to require multiple lawyers. Tools like automated e-discovery or linguistic analysis have shown to be useful here. Here is an article on that topic from a while back: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?pagew...
- einhverfr 13y ago
  Which enables more complex litigation which requires more lawyers and more compliance effort.
  - jaxn 13y ago
    For the cases that need more complex litigation, but that is a small minority. Ex: We paid for clerks to transcribe a previous hearing. That could be replaced by software.
    - einhverfr 13y ago
      Is there any evidence that demand for legal services is being suppressed by technology? In the absence of such where is that efficiency going?
      - jaxn 13y ago
        Demand for legal services? I don't know about that, but demand for lawyers has definitely been suppressed. When the recent downturn took effect, firms quit hiring for 2-3 years. This left multiple classes of law students unable to find jobs. The firms also cut the paid internships. The hiring hasn't returned to the previous levels and the internships are still scarce. I don't think we would be looking for a decrease in demand for the service as much as we should be looking for a decrease in demand for people to provide the service (likely due to increased efficiency by the service providers).
        einhverfr 13y ago
        So demand is being suppressed by people's ability to pay, not by the technology, right?

foobarian 13y ago

You can't replace a lawyer with software either. Maybe not one-for-one, but one lawyer with a state of the art data mining warehouse can probably do the job that used to require multiple lawyers. Tools like automated e-discovery or linguistic analysis have shown to be useful here. Here is an article on that topic from a while back: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?pagew...

einhverfr 13y ago
Which enables more complex litigation which requires more lawyers and more compliance effort.
- jaxn 13y ago
  For the cases that need more complex litigation, but that is a small minority. Ex: We paid for clerks to transcribe a previous hearing. That could be replaced by software.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    Is there any evidence that demand for legal services is being suppressed by technology? In the absence of such where is that efficiency going?
    - jaxn 13y ago
      Demand for legal services? I don't know about that, but demand for lawyers has definitely been suppressed. When the recent downturn took effect, firms quit hiring for 2-3 years. This left multiple classes of law students unable to find jobs. The firms also cut the paid internships. The hiring hasn't returned to the previous levels and the internships are still scarce. I don't think we would be looking for a decrease in demand for the service as much as we should be looking for a decrease in demand for people to provide the service (likely due to increased efficiency by the service providers).
      - einhverfr 13y ago
        So demand is being suppressed by people's ability to pay, not by the technology, right?