Day 328: Lawyers and AI at the Crossroads

Robert Lee Johnson (1911-1938). Heritage Image Partnership Ltd./Alamy.com

Last fall, The Economist sponsored a conversation between DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and historian Yuval Noah Hurari about the future of AI.

Suleyman urges a precautionary approach to AI development and an international governance body to help humanity decide what boundaries to place on the growth of this “new digital species.”

With proper governance in place, Suleyman expressed optimism that AI will enhance, not degrade or destroy, civilization.

Hurari, who describes his discipline as “the study of change,” is less optimistic.

“We invest so much in developing artificial intelligence,” he said. “But … our own minds have huge scope for development. Also with humanity we haven’t seen our true potential yet. And if we invest, for every dollar and minute that we invest in AI we invest another dollar and minute in developing our own consciousness, our own mind, I think we’ll be okay, but I don’t see it happening. I don’t see this kind of investment in human beings that we’re seeing in machines.”

Lawyers at The Crossroads

As lawyers, we often acts as the traffic cops of governance. We stand at the crossroads of change, identifying what might go wrong and what rules we might need to mitigate potential harm.

When it comes to AI, though, our reaction time is slow. The law is not a mathematical profession. I’d venture to say that most lawyers today understand AI mostly as something that might make research easier, at best or replace our jobs entirely, at worst.

There’s so much more at stake.

Maybe now is the perfect time for lawyers to revisit Robert Johnson’s haunting classic, The Crossroads.