The Week Before Covid
- Mike Dickey
- 44 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Missed a day yesterday, which is a great way to reduce the number of folks paying attention. I just got incredibly busy with work that didn't really reflect itself in my billable hours at the end of the day. Not sure how that happened.
I ran across a couple thought-provoking essays this morning discussing the same topic--how AI is on the cusp of radically changing our society. Or not.
As usual, the more balanced and someone skeptical view comes from the Atlantic. We've seen these things before, the economists assure us. Change is slow. Society adapts.
Sorry about the firewall. You really should subscribe.
Of course, the same essay makes the very good point that the soothsayers when it comes to AI have only a retrospective view because that's where one finds one's dataset--we can't know what's going to happen, so we don't have those beads of future information that would make for a more informed discussion. And that unknown makes the author of the Atlantic piece a little squirmy.
The other essay captured my attention more forcefully because it's written by an actual information tech guy who works in AI, and is a lot more alarmist.
His analogy drew me right in--it's February 2020, and we're all living our lives without an inkling of the massive disruption that is only a few weeks away. No one living in that moment could've predicted what was coming because we'd never seen anything quite like it, a pandemic leading to a coordinated global response that basically shut down the planet for months. Well, not Florida. And we created the body count to prove it.
I digress.
Shumer's point is that he's seen what's happening with his own eyes, spent time with senior partners at big law firms who get it, who are taking the time to learn how to use AI beyond simply as a really smart search engine. And where he sees this leading causes him to offer advice like don't take on any new debt, don't advise your kids that the path to middle class comfort lies in a professional degree in a field, such as law, where there won't be any entry level jobs in five years worth having. Prepare for something society shattering. Maybe it won't happen, but things are accelerating in a way that makes the extreme scenario--not "worst case", which imposes a value judgment on the coming change--the most likely.
Of course, the cataclysm wrought by Covid had its upsides. I thought of my own experience this morning when I read a story in the NYT about a 50-something personal injury lawyer who's now on the U.S. Olympic curling team.
I tried to link the article, but it's firewalled as well.
What struck me was how Covid made all this possible--when his hearings and depositions all transitioned to Zoom, he could practice from anywhere including, apparently, the Olympic training village.
That's mostly been my life for nearly six years now, sitting in PJs and drafting documents, interviewing clients and witnesses, and occasionally donning a collared shirt for a virtual hearing. All from a part of the world I've grown to love and never would've been able to experience had that virus not escaped from some lab in Wuhan. Was Covid a negative? Of course. It killed over a million Americans. But the aftermath changed a lot of lives for the better, mine included.
Maybe AI will be the same. One just needs to lean into it, and learn to adapt rather than going full Luddite and bemoaning the inevitable.