Links for Jan 16th, 2023
Martin Luther King, Jr's Letter from Birmingham Jail; the threat of robot lawyers; the formula for success; technology is creating four big societal shifts
Brad DeLong shares Martin Luther King, Jr’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, written in April, 1963. Good writing influences and edifies. Good writing is active. Good writing penetrates as much as it illuminates. This is good writing:
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
Alberto Romero writes at The Algorithmic Bridge about robot lawyers:
Joshua Browder, CEO at DoNotPay, posted this on Monday:
As it couldn’t be otherwise, this bold claim generated a lot of debate to the point that Twitter now flags the tweet with a link to the Supreme Court page of prohibited items.
Even if they finally can’t do it due to legal reasons, it’s worth considering the question from an ethical and social standpoint. What happens if the AI system makes a serious mistake? Could people without access to a lawyer benefit from a mature version of this technology?
A lot of people (including me) lambasted Joshua Browder for his tweet. On the other hand, it garnered 7.4 million views, 16,000 likes, and 2,000 quote tweets. Most startups would kill for that kind of distribution. I read the tweet more as a marketing ploy than anything else, and on that score it excels.
But let’s ignore for a moment the marketing and distribution angle here, and engage more seriously with the question of what AI portends for the law, lawyers, and people’s access to the legal system. Lawyers are a prickly bunch. They don’t like technologists or entrepreneurs telling them that “AI is going to disrupt you.” Such claims raise lawyers’ hackles.
And yet, I suspect the claim is directionally accurate. A very hand-wavy, and hedged statement: generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, will become more capable over time, and at some future point, a lot of what lawyers do will be doable by a future version of ChatGPT. I’m picking my words carefully and intentionally here: “a lot”. Not everything. But a lot of lawyers’ work, especially the low end transactional stuff, easily commoditizable by instantiating it in software, will be eaten by AI. And the lawyers will resist. They’ll assert, not unreasonably given their priors, that an AI legal tool is “practicing law without a license.”
Expect litigation about this. A software package that purports to write someone’s will? Or a divorce decree? Or a real estate acquisition? “This cannot stand!” cavil the aggrieved lawyers. And yet, it will: technology has a funny way of worming its way into industries previously thought untouchable by silicon.
The best way to deal with this is not to fight it, but rather to accept it and to adapt. In the context of lawyers, the best response is to view AI technology as an opportunity. AI technology will be a complement to lawyers’ practice. Those lawyers who can move up the value chain will fare best. Those lawyers who insist on selling a commoditized product that can be eaten by AI will fare worse.
Adapt or be eaten. The choice is yours.
Here’s the Formula for Success
I’m in the middle of watching Netflix’s new series about professional tennis, Break Point:
Contra the negative reviews that I have seen, the documentary series demonstrates well how important healthy mental attitudes are for success. Success compounds over time, but it only compounds if the person takes action. Mere idea generation is not enough. I can daydream about being a professional tennis player, but if I am not willing or able to take action on that dream, I will never become one.
This graphic is fairly popular amongst tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists:
The intuition here, as with tennis, is simple: it’s very easy to come up with ideas. I can come up with hundreds of ideas for the next billion-dollar startup. I can come up with hundreds of ideas about being a professional tennis player. Or a professional chef. Or a novelist. Or a gymnast. But, without execution, none of those ideas has much value. This is one reason why academics are so lambasted by society. Ideas divorced from execution count for nought.
Go to the Medium article linked in this section’s header. The author presents this graphic:
Success is the result of effort compounded over time.
Rishad Tobaccowala argues that society is presently going through four fundamental shifts:
technology (AI, etc.)
power (institutional to individual)
boundary (office vs remote work)
mind shifts (generational differences)
He writes:
The Internet reshapes borders in its own way and creates amazing opportunities and wealth as well as significant legal challenges when companies and the Internet are global, and laws are local. A company like Google has nearly 1000 in house lawyers and multiple outside legal firms since it and other companies like Meta have become a form of government and impact business and society everywhere. Current discussion on how to ensure Chinese ownership of TikTok is not leveraged against the West is an indicator of how the Internet is re-writing the rules.
It is not just the rise of the East and the Internet that is roiling governance but also modern healthcare and gene therapy. As modern medicine can extend the quantity of life but not the quality of life many want new rules on deciding when to exit. With every major country aging fast, this is just one of the issues we will grapple with.
The future will not fit in the organizations and governance of the past where we need to grapple with AI Ethics, Climate Change, Gene Technology, Data Privacy, an African-Asian future, and Space Junk/Wars and much more. We needed new rules for an Industrial Age since the rules of an Agricultural Age were no longer relevant. Similarly, the legal and institutional frameworks of the past cannot get us into the future.
I think that this is mainly accurate, and it has been unfolding for the past twenty-five years, or so, since Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina invented the Mosaic web browser. The recent successes of AI and other technologies will only speed up this transition over the next couple of decades.
The people best positioned to take advantage of these shifts will be those most willing and able to adapt, and to cast off irrelevant priors. As with the lawyers I discuss above: adapt or be eaten. The choice is yours.