I am a man in the autumn of his career who has never owned a smart phone and who is triggered by the sing-song phrase “Simply download the app” with all its cheerful pretence of making our lives easier, when it typically means we will make living a little less human. I therefore accept that with my obvious biases I am not best placed to have a worthwhile point of view on Ai.
My strong plea therefore is for you not to read this post, but to go outside and to look at the sky, to marvel at trees and to call someone you care about to tell them that you love them, in your own voice and in your own words, without the need for a downloadable Funky fucking Pigeon e-card.
If you are going to read on, I promise this is not intended to be a pointless rant against Ai. I firmly believe that used well, we may have the opportunity with Ai to feed the world, to cure once incurable diseases and to have the means to help our beleaguered planet to thrive again. Who could be against that?
I don’t even mind if as a result a few tech billionaires want to fly their mates to the moon, if it means we all get the planetary upside.
My concern therefore is not for the existential dividend that could solve big world problems for generations to come, but for the mind-numbing, myopic, faux heroic chase to make anything and everything Ai enabled; it is as if everything is devalued if it is not Ai, and it feels like we are in a headlong lemming dash not to be left out.
In a sluggish economy when there isn’t a budget to care properly for our elderly, to repair the school roof or fix a pot hole, literally billions of pounds are being spent on long-odds vanity bets. The hope being, I assume, that if enough money is chucked at creating a solution, it might one day find a problem that it can live with.
Months of time are being given to so called transformational projects where most people thought things were ok before, and all because a massive dump of FOMO has paralysed common sense and triggered a Pavlovian response from CEOs not to be left out or left behind.
I don’t care if a few entrepreneurs strike gold, because most are panning gravel and in this new wild west, real human colleagues wonder WTAF is going on? At this rate, the legal profession might be unrecognisable in five years, with real world consequences for careers, families and communities, but no worries because now we can track low risk administrative NDAs better than ever before and we have made the paralegal redundant. I mean, top work guys, we are really shifting the paradigm, FFS.
You might ask “what do I know?” and that is a fair challenge. In a post truth world where on social media we have discredited experts and dismantled polite conversation, and traded this for soft porn and far right wet dreams, I may know nothing and perhaps this post is just for clicks.
So, I’ll reign in the polemic and finish more calmly… My work is predominantly supporting lawyers; all are very clever people, most of whom are open to new ideas, and most are persuadable if an argument is compelling. However, these are people who are also incredibly time poor, often people-pleasing, and prone to need validation by overachieving for their clients and employers…
These are people who have been told that efficiency means they must do more with less when they are already over-stretched. These are people who are groomed not to say “no” and who will sacrifice a weekend or even a holiday not to let anyone down (apart from those who love them).
But, surely Ai could help these people reclaim control of their diaries and take some of the low value/low risk work away?
It might, but history says otherwise, and definitely not before we start preparing people for change, instead of preparing change for people.
What is already happening, in the hamster cage of work, is that the hamster wheel now just goes even faster. We are told “get on it or lose out”, but on this Ai wheel, I fear we will have even less time for reflection, for wisdom, for kindness, for development, and for joy.
Ai isn’t benevolent, it is driven to succeed for its backers, and we are being sold sweeties by the child catcher.
My career started in a decidedly analogue era, where there was no email and no internet. Lawyers wrote letters and made calls when things were urgent. Email came as a wonderful gift of instant access, so that our time could be saved for more important things. But it never happened. We all just sent far more emails than we ever sent letters, and we stopped calling each other when things were urgent, instead we sent high priority emails written in CAPS.
Email suffocated the benefits it promised.
Purveyors of tech then told us they had the solution to too many emails, and gave us instant messaging and Slack channels and god knows what else, so we could go faster still. When the drug didn’t work the answer was more drugs.
No one asked to go faster and faster, what we wanted was time.
Now we have the next generation of child catchers selling us their Ai sweeties, promising freedom and time. However, we all know that what they are really selling are faster hamster wheels. The existential conundrum for all of us is that if we get off the wheel we lose and if we stay on the wheel we lose.
I know that if I pitched an idea today that said before we spend a million pounds on developing a new Ai enabled agent, could we spend a few hundred pounds on working with a behavioural psychologist, I would be told there was no budget for that and surely there is a chatbot we can access for free.
Mental health in the legal profession is a problem already, so shouldn’t we take a moment to reflect on what we are doing so that we do not make it worse?
The greatest gift we have as lawyers is how we leverage our expertise through wisdom and judgment. Our super power is the space we create to build relationships, to explore options, to establish tolerance to risk and risk appetite, to challenge, to comply and to do the right thing.
Diminish this and we start to lose our identity.
I have said for the last 25 years that all business wants from its lawyers is to say “yes” quickly. Our job a quarter of a century ago, and still today, is to facilitate that ambition but with enough challenge, enough reflection and enough wisdom to say no when necessary and to make a compelling case to pause when everyone else wants to speed up. Our role is to serve what the business needs, not what it wants. Our duty, even if I may sound a little pompous in saying so, is not just to our client, but to society, to justice and to our own individual humanity.
Ai risks sucking the oxygen out of reflection, and making wisdom less important, where decisions can be made in a split second but the consequences lived with for ever. And when it goes wrong, and we all know that it will, the solemn inquiry that follows will say there are lessons to be learned about user error, and the lack of training and the poor judgement of managers. It won’t say that Ai was a Trojan hamster that spun the wheel so fast it ruined it for all of us.
The lessons are there for us to learn now, we haven’t got to wait for it to go wrong.
Take care. Paul xx
