This past weekend, I went to Georgia for my great-nephew’s tenth birthday. As godfather, I owed him a visit. In between the birthday party and NCAA basketball games, his father showed me ChatGPT. I stood agape.
His father is chief legal counsel for a large state university; he showed me how ChatGPT can create legal briefs. Normally, whenever a case goes to trial, the lawyer will have an associate do research. The staffer will identify relevant past cases, draw inferences, and create a brief—a summary of findings. Normally, this takes days to weeks, depending upon the size and complexity of the case. ChatGPT created a legal brief in seconds. Artificial intelligence (AI) is known for its ability to summarize information, make connections, and draw inferences. This is the crux of the legal profession. Law school students need not fear their future jobs, however: AI makes mistakes and someone has to check its answers. My nephew showed me an AI brief that sounded convincing but cited cases that never happened. Nevertheless, its ability to make connections between issues was astounding, and the implications are equally astounding.
In World Leadership, I predicted that the world would transition to a new societal level during this century. A requirement for this is a new legal infrastructure; more specifically, a transition from the current printing-based legal infrastructure (which we’ve had since the 1600s) to a digital legal infrastructure. I predicted this will happen in four phases: conversion, coherence, new ideas, new structure. I also noted that we have completed the conversion phase and we are beginning the coherence phase. This phase will work the kinks out of our legal code, and eliminate inconsistencies and contradictions. Until now, we’ve lacked tools to do this, but AI has moved us much closer.
We can expect to see changes to the legal field made by computers this century parallel changes made to the field by printing in the 1500s. Printing changes ultimately led to the creation of the nation-state. Computing changes, once AI and other technologies have matured, will lead to the creation of the nation-union.
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Author experience
Danielle, Abril, “AI Isn’t Taking Over Jobs Yet–but it is Transforming Them,” Washington Post, G1; 28 March 2022; see also https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/ai-jobs-workplace/
Photo: Time