Re: Basic misunderstanding how law firm works
Screw that, the article begins with a basic misunderstanding of how history works and then gets everything else wrong from there.
AI will replace the easiest jobs first, because it's easier to write the AI for them. In fact, it already has in many places; if we take AI to be a simple chain of actions which may vary by input then we're been replacing the 'dumb' jobs with it for a couple of hundred years already. Far from AI replacing jobs 'from the top down', it's been working it's way up for so long that people like Mark Pesce have ceased to even recognize that low-end automation used to be done by hand. The genuinely hard jobs? Those are the creative leaps required to do real research (original research, not just 'let's make this existing thing smaller), or to come to a political compromise between hundreds of competing interests using wildly different value systems.
If doctors and lawyers have things to worry about, it's only because we've been able to get a robot to answer the phone or build a car for 30 years already.
There's a reason why many of the high-paying jobs in the world come under the term 'liberal arts'. They're arts. Consider the job of the editor, for example - it's not just reading text and correcting typos. The editor's job extends to determining the political line of the paper, which changes over time and by issue and adjusts depending on the market buying the paper; it involves a great deal of social networking and negotiation and just downright human interaction which is not going to be AI-ified until we have something that passes the Turing test.
IT doesn't 'owe it to the world' to create new jobs for people because we took the old ones away. That's not really our problem. We created tools that have produced conditions of unprecedented wealth and plenty. The matter of how the fruits of that are distributed have never really been in our hands; mostly because Economics is the science of doing that. Most of the world's present problems are down to the epic failure of that discipline, and we can't automate them away either.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
