Artificial intelligence, once reserved for the realms of science fiction and Hollywood, is in the midst of its arrival. While the sort of artificial general intelligence we would recognize from feature films is still some ways off, AI that is much more narrowly applied has existed in some flavor for several years now. One of the debate points among those that question what the overall impact will be on humanity when AI is widespread is whether any of our jobs will be safe from computer systems and software with several thousand times our mental capabilities are competing for our jobs.
For lawyers, it seems, that question was answered starkly recently when a group of top contract lawyers competed with an AI to review contracts and were blown out of the water by their technological competitor.
A new study, conducted by legal AI platform LawGeex in consultation with law professors from Stanford University, Duke University School of Law, and University of Southern California, pitted twenty experienced lawyers against an AI trained to evaluate legal contracts. Competitors were given four hours to review five non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and identify 30 legal issues, including arbitration, confidentiality of relationship, and indemnification. They were scored by how accurately they identified each issue.
The human lawyers achieved, on average, an 85 percent accuracy rate, while the AI achieved 95 percent accuracy. The AI also completed the task in 26 seconds, while the human lawyers took 92 minutes on average. The AI also achieved 100 percent accuracy in one contract, on which the highest-scoring human lawyer scored only 97 percent. In short, the human lawyers were trounced.
This really shouldn’t be all that surprising, actually. Nearly every business practice, from call-routing to IT, has undergone a process for removing the fallible human element wherever possible. Auto-attendants have replaced receptionists. Algorithms have replaced IT admins staring blankly at monitoring systems to spot trouble. Even the American pastime of driving cars is beginning to be replaced by driver-free automobiles governed by software rather than wetware, explicitly with the promise of safer roads as we bumbling humans are taken out of the driver’s seat.
Still, when something as both high level and industry specific as legal contract law can be more reliably done by machines than people, it’s enough to make you worry.
It’s worth remembering, however, that worries like this have accompanied most technological advances in human history, and they have always been wrong. Some, such as Gartner, have argued that AI will mirror most other technology advances in that it will actually create more jobs than it renders obsolete.
The number of jobs affected will vary from industry to industry. The public sector, healthcare and education are expected to gain the most jobs, while manufacturing and transportation may be the hit the hardest, said Gartner’s research director, Manjunath Bhat.
“Robots are not here to take away our jobs, they’re here to give us a promotion – I think that’s the way we should start looking at AI,” Bhat told CNBC on Tuesday.
Disruptive forces don’t always make things easier on everyone, but they rarely are the economic doomsday so many fear. Somehow, I tend to think that human lawyers will still exist far, far into the future.
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