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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday November 15 2016, @06:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the better-jump-the-shark dept.

Your career is now a game of musical chairs: you need to be ready when the song stops

...

Although sixty years old, artificial intelligence remained mostly a curiosity until half a decade ago, when IBM's Watson trounced the world's best Jeopardy! players in a televised match. At the time, you might have thought nothing of that - what does a game show matter in the scheme of things?

It didn't stop there. IBM sent Watson to train with oncologists and lawyers and financial advisers. Quite suddenly, three very established professions, just the sort of thing you'd tell your kids to pursue as a ticket to prosperity, seemed a lot less certain of their futures in a world where intelligence, like computing before it, becomes pervasive, then commoditised.

These top-of-their-profession projects show that the driver to bring artificial intelligence into any field isn't the amount of labor, but rather the cost of that labor. A lawyer costs fifty times more per hour than a retail worker and so is that many times more likely to find themselves with an AI competitor.


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  • (Score: 1) by nobu_the_bard on Tuesday November 15 2016, @07:04PM

    by nobu_the_bard (6373) on Tuesday November 15 2016, @07:04PM (#427116)

    Most law doesn't go to trial, it's done in mails and phone calls. AI could easily handle that stuff once it groks the higher concepts. Most of it isn't that complex anyway.

    Live lawyers could be contracted out just for the courtroom stuff until we have good AI-controlled automatons. Probably a ways off of that last one; would need ones that look convincing to a jury, not just "good enough" for lifting heavy stuff. I assume that won't happen at a significant scale until after people are used to AI for day-to-day stuff.

    I'm a huge Banks/Asimov fan though so mark me biased here.

  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday November 15 2016, @07:25PM

    by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday November 15 2016, @07:25PM (#427133) Journal

    Copyright holders are bombarding Google with Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices, in an effort to remove millions of pirate links from the search results. In 2014, there were more than 1 million each day, totaling 345,169,134 for the year.

    -- https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2388720/googles-dmca-notices-increase-exponentially-year-to-year [searchenginewatch.com]

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by tynin on Tuesday November 15 2016, @09:42PM

      by tynin (2013) on Tuesday November 15 2016, @09:42PM (#427217) Journal

      Not your fault, but I'm cringing at that math.

      More than 1 million a day? Doesn't almost a million a day sound just as good? Gah! Damn you sensationalism!

  • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday November 16 2016, @04:57AM

    by mhajicek (51) on Wednesday November 16 2016, @04:57AM (#427371)

    Most law work is research.

    --
    The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek