AI is going to immeasurably change white collar working activities as it will eventually perform all routine tasks.
This is going to happen at warp speed so you have been warned.
ChatGPT is Google on steroids and Patrick O’Malley, a keynote speaker in USA, has written the following on this for general dissemination.
You may be sending a child to college, or may even be going to college yourself, but due to dramatic changes in ChatGPT and AI, you really have to consider the impact that this type of software will have on future careers.
Here’s just a single example of the speed at which ChatGPT is progressing, and it is just one of the implementations of AI.
When the first version of ChatGPT was made public in early December of 2022, they gave it a bar exam, even though it wasn’t specifically trained on how to take the bar exam. It passed, but was in the lowest 10% of test takers.
This week, just 3 1/2 months later, the newest version of ChatGPT (version 4) was released, they gave it a bar exam, and it scored better than 90% of students taking the bar exam.
At this rate, it will score better than 400% of students by next summer.
Ok, it’s not always accurate, especially at math.
However, the point is that if you have a high school senior or college senior who wants to become a lawyer, how are they going to compete with the speed of this technology, especially when ChatGPT doesn’t sleep, or go to parties, or drink, or play video games?
ChatGPT could already write legal contracts right out of the womb back in December of 2022, and it could consider all national and local laws. It could make reasonable, coherent legal arguments even back then, giving potential arguments to the supreme court while citing applicable precedents from specific court cases.
Suffolk University Law School Dean Andrew Perlman was “blown away, as so many people are.” He gave it about a dozen different requests, and his conclusion was that it “isn’t ready for prime time, but it doesn’t seem all that far off.”
Some lawyers will argue that it won’t eliminate lawyers for a variety of reasons, like:
- it isn’t perfect
- many aspects of a lawyer’s job require a human touch
- it may be a long time before it can be functional in a court setting
However, here are some counter arguments:
- it is getting more perfect every day, at breathtaking speed, and it doesn’t sleep
- it hasn’t even been specifically trained to do law yet, but some company will implement that
- it won’t eliminate all lawyers, but it will significantly speed up the jobs for some lawyers
- a company that once needed 20 lawyers may soon be able to do the same work with 5 or 10 lawyers. Same with a small town.
- if you need a simple contract to be done (like a will where you don’t have a significant amount of money), you can pay a lawyer $150 to do it, or have ChatGPT create a reasonable one for free.
Change your mindset.
The question isn’t whether there will be lawyers in the future.
The question is whether we will need 1.3 Million lawyers, like we currently have, or whether we can get away with just a million, or just 500,000, in which case your college student may not be able to get a job when they get out of college in a few years. And will they still have a job in a decade? And will lawyers still be able to command large fees, when most of the work be done by ChatGPT for free?
The question then becomes whether you care about the “Return On Investment” that you’d get from paying $50,000 a year for their college tuition.
And please share this with people that you know that
- have children
- write tuition checks
- care about $50,000 a year