I once had a client who told me that what he really wanted was a one-armed lawyer, because he was fed up with lawyers saying, “on the one hand everything is going to be peachy keen, but on the other hand, the world is going to end.”
I was thinking about that confused client as I sat down to write this final post in a series about artificial intelligence. As much as I would like to wrap it all up into a package and tie a bow on it, I am unsure where artificial intelligence is taking us.
So, let’s talk about my two hands.
On the one hand, I started practicing law in 1981, when word processing was just coming into use. We had typewriters, with some memory, that could store a few pages of text. Every lawyer had a secretary, and busy lawyers had more than one. All those secretaries spent much of their day typing.
In rapid succession, down from heaven, came dedicated word processers, desktop computers, and, finally, the blessed laptops.
As lawyers did more of the administrative work themselves, they were soon sharing their secretaries with one or more other lawyers. So, what happened to all those secretaries? Some of them started doing more sophisticated tasks, were renamed “legal assistants,” and did just fine. Others who could not adapt lost their jobs.
With all the jobs lost to technology since I started practicing law, you would think that unemployment would have skyrocketed. Strangely enough, Dr. Google tells me that unemployment in Canada today is lower than it was in 1981. Obviously, while on a micro level individuals suffer when technology replace jobs, on a macro level this has not been the case. Will it be any different with artificial intelligence?
On the other hand, maybe this time it really is different. Perhaps the evil tech billionaires have finally created something that is going to destroy the financial well-being of many millions of people and ruin life as we know it.
Conclusion
In 1992, James Carville coined the campaign phrase, “it’s the economy, stupid” for Bill Clinton. It applies here as well. If the economy is strong, there will be jobs for those who can do what AI cannot do. If the economy is weak, there will not. Of course, for individuals who cannot adapt and learn to perform jobs that AI is incapable of doing, things are going to be tough.
I really don’t know which way this thing is headed but let me leave you with one troubling thought. If the doomsayers are correct, and we are all going be unemployed, who is going to be able to afford to buy all those technology products that the tech billionaires are selling? They are bright people, aren’t they? They must have figured that out, mustn’t they have?
Something tells me that in the future we are going to need three hands to keep track of what is going on.
For more about my fear of where we are headed, see my article on the Appara website here: https://bit.ly/4mTF7pb