If you work largely in front of a computer screen, will you have a job in two years? Will you have the career that you have now, or that you imagine for yourself?
More below the jump.
Paul Caron posted a link to Matt Shumer’s recent broadside about AI and labor markets (“Something Big Is Happening”). He is the CEO of an AI company.
I think of my friend, who’s a lawyer. I keep telling him to try using AI at his firm, and he keeps finding reasons it won’t work. It’s not built for his specialty, it made an error when he tested it, it doesn’t understand the nuance of what he does. And I get it. But I’ve had partners at major law firms reach out to me for advice, because they’ve tried the current versions and they see where this is going. One of them, the managing partner at a large firm, spends hours every day using AI. He told me it’s like having a team of associates available instantly. He’s not using it because it’s a toy. He’s using it because it works. And he told me something that stuck with me: every couple of months, it gets significantly more capable for his work. He said if it stays on this trajectory, he expects it’ll be able to do most of what he does before long… and he’s a managing partner with decades of experience. He’s not panicking. But he’s paying very close attention.
Andrew Yang posted something very similar (“The End of the Office”):
How many roles essentially consist of processing information and then presenting it to someone to make a decision? Now not only the process and report will be automated, but perhaps the decision as well.
This will result in the great disemboweling of white-collar jobs.
This automation wave will kick millions of white-collar workers to the curb in the next 12 – 18 months. As one company starts to streamline, all of their competitors will follow suit. It will become a competition because the stock market will reward you if you cut headcount and punish you if you don’t. As one investor put it, “Sell anything that consists of people sitting at a desk looking at a computer.”
I’ve started to call this displacement wave the Fuckening because that feels more visceral.
Do you sit at a desk and look at a computer much of the day? Take this very seriously.
I want to forecast a few of the immediate social impacts of the Fuckening:
1. Mid-career office workers will be fired in droves. …
This sort of thing can sound like AI enthusiasm meeting sensationalism and hysteria. Even if there are grains of accuracy in the forecasts, it’s (also) possible for some white collar professions (ahem, lawyers and law professors) to say, a la Bobby McFerrin, that’s not going to happen to us. Less provocatively, lawyers might take some comfort in arguments of the sort that the economist Adam Ozimek offers here, focusing on the fact that some jobs and services are inextricably intertwined with “the human touch.”
Can the legal profession – academic and practitioner – afford to be complacent?
One might wonder how I came to be included in the current roster of TaxProf Blog contributors. I teach copyright. I write about knowledge commons. That’s not exactly the CV of someone whose charge is to write here about legal education.
My winding road to this space started about 15 years ago, when it occurred to me that the response of legal education to the knock-on effects of the Great Recession resembled in some respects the response of my home city — Pittsburgh — to obvious signs of fragility in the steel industry. Careful observers in the 1950s and 1960s saw the end coming, long before the actual end of Steel (capital “S” as we do, here) arrived in 1982 and 1983. The observations were either ignored or channeled into cosmetics. Pittsburgh’s famed 1950s and early 1960s “Renaissance” of civic improvements (clean air, clean water, pretty parks, modern skyscrapers, an opera house that later became a hockey arena) was largely a “keep the businessmen and their wives happy to live in Pittsburgh” strategy.) Pittsburgh did not evolve gracefully from a heavy industrial model to the “eds and meds” city pushed by local Chamber of Commerce types in the early 2000s and to the “AI and robotics” theme that dominates Pittsburgh’s contemporary public narrative. Changes wrought by financial systems (the cost of money), global demand, technological innovation, and labor markets were largely ignored in Pittsburgh until they could not be, and then change was traumatic and abrupt. More than 40 years later, much of the Pittsburgh region is still (“steel,” to use Pittsburgh-ese) flat on its back, economically, socially, and culturally. The transition to new things has been awkward and significantly incomplete.
Pittsburgh is not the only formerly prosperous industrial city in what used to be called the “Rust Belt” to be suffering, even today.
Way back in 2011, I wrote about the parallels between law and law schools and Steel, in the sense that structural and system-wide changes were coming and might be fast, dramatic, and disruptive – and not in good ways – rather gracefully evolutionary. Yang’s post and Shumer’s essay remind me of what I wrote then. (They also remind me that a senior Pitt Law colleague of mine said to me in 2011 that law professors have nothing to worry about, because law schools and lawyers have no competitors.) In future posts here at TaxProf Blog, I may revive some of my older arguments and update them. The most famous book about the end of Pittsburgh’s steel industry is titled “And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the Steel Industry,” by John Hoerr. Is the wolf at law’s door?
