Brian Leiter (Chicago), AI Developer Warns the AI Jobs Apocalypse Is Closer Than We Realize:
[A]n excerpt [from Matt Shumer (CEO, Otherside AI), Something Big Is Happening]:
[O]n February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT). And something clicked. Not like a light switch … more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.
I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.
This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too. …
Will 50% of law jobs disappear in the next five years? A former student, now a seasoned litigator with 25 years of experience, told me: “I’ve been mainly using Claude right now. I’m consistently surprised and scared about what it can do. I think a lot of 1st year lawyer jobs are going to be eliminated in the not-too-distant future.” If that happens, and even if it’s only 25% rather than 50%, there is going to be a massive contraction in law schools, much greater than what the Great Recession produced 15 years ago.
The bigger worry, though, is that what the labor economists call the “reinstatement effect” (where new technologies eliminate old jobs, but create new job opportunities elsewhere [e.g., the invention of automobiles was bad news for blacksmiths, but created jobs in auto factories]) may not apply here. As the author we began with put it: “When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.”
Barstool Sports, The CEO Of OthersideAI Wrote A Terrifying Article About The Future Of AI (Basically We’re All Doomed And It’s Going To Happen Within A Year)
Editor’s Note: If you would like to receive a daily email with links to legal education posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here.
