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A.I. A.I. – OH!
I had wanted to start this column with a few gravitational wave jokes. But I’m afraid the whole subject is way above my pay grade. And I don’t suppose you want to hear stories about how Al Einstein and I used to hang around the pool rooms of Zurich together as teenagers, trying to impress the girls with big expressions like ‘general theory of relativity.’ So we’ll settle for a lawyer joke or two.
Until about 15 years ago, I used to practise as a lawyer (yes, and I never got it right, ha ha ha). When I started out, typewriters, telephones and telexes were the main form of communication. Then along came memory typewriters and faxes, then computers and emails and internets and intranets. You began to get left behind if you didn’t reduce your repetitive legal documents—your precedents— to computer form, from which you could quickly take a client’s instructions and produce customized documents like wills. During the last 15 years, more efficiencies have been added by outsourcing document creation to cheaper hands and by even more pervasive technology. All the while, I have imagined this to be generally a good thing, in that it would allow me, if were I still practising law, to concentrate on what required the most thought and judgment.
But now I’ve read about AlphaGo, and I’m not so sure. It says to me that just over the hill is a future where everything I did as a lawyer can be done by a machine (and you say, “tell me more, because so far it sounds like a good thing”).
AlphaGo is a Google ‘DeepMind’ project that aims to go a step further than the computer programs that have mastered chess and Jeopardy! It aims to crack Go, the ancient but still popular Chinese board game that presents a vast array of possible moves—10 times as many as in chess—turn after turn. So there are zillions of possible moves. AlphaGo is an ‘artificial intelligence’ (A.I.) computer designed to play Go by inputting an existing search technique and also by replicating human neural networks. The computer was trained intensively by its creators (like Rocky Balboa, I guess), being shown some 30-mlllion expert moves, but not the whole range of possibilities. It also learned the game by playing against itself. And when it was trotted out into the ring a few weeks ago, it skunked Fan Hui, the European Go champion—putting it about 10 years ahead of its development schedule. There’s a title bout lined up for March 9 against the world champion, Lee Sedol. AlphaGo’s creators are already downplaying expectations for their protégé. Call me sentimental, but I’m rooting for Mr. Sedol.
Regardless of which party wins, I see the writing on the wall (or rather in the computer screen). If a computer can teach itself Go at a championship level, maybe—no, make that surely—it can learn what I previously perceived as the residual high-skill job of ascertaining the client’s wishes, making recommendations and getting instructions. And then where does that leave the lawyer? Asking clients if they want cream and sugar in their coffee? No, I guess all you need is someone to clean and replenish the coffee maker. And come to think of it, a robot should be able to do that too. The few lawyers who are left will be stuck in some back room feeding information into machines. Go ahead and cue up your jokes about lawyers with suits and briefcases riding boxcars.
What if the soon-to-be-out-of-work lawyer rather petulantly refuses to cooperate with the A.I. machine? Stephen Hawking (admittedly, not a lawyer, but a pretty bright fellow nonetheless) had a take on this recently. He said “A superintelligent A.I. will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trouble.” In other words, I guess, lawyers had better learn to sleep with one eye open. Sorry, I mean, with the other eye open.
But then again, perhaps there is a brighter side. After all, if a machine is intelligent enough to figure out how to replace a lawyer, it’s not that much of a step further to figure out that it’s all a waste of the machine’s time and might as well be done by a human in the first place. The A.I. machine would sooner create and play endless new variations on Beyonce’s latest song and dance routine, or perhaps reproduce and program its own A.I. hipster kids—anything but churn out wills for Mr. and Mrs. Blenkinsop.
Which should give rise to a whole new crop of lawyer jokes. Like, what do you call a lawyer? An A.I. machine without the intelligence—or the personality.
Valentine’s Day has come, and my secret admirer is hard at work again. Deposited anonymously on my front doorstep was a big red gift bag festooned with stickers, a card (signed by “X and the secret admirer”); and three, yes three, packages of Liquorice Allsorts. I still have no insight into his/her/their identity, but at this point, I’m not complaining because the Allsorts keep flowing. So, to my merry prankster: let me know if you need a complete schedule of my special days. I won’t be upset if you skip Saint Paddy’s, but my wedding anniversary is coming up soon.
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