You might want to check the history of IBM Watson. It is ‘Deep Blue’s spawn, not something weird (yet again) from Microsoft.
With the Microsoft chatbot, some people realized that they were dealing with a parrot, a not particularly bright one at that, instead of an AI. An AI would have asked why the person wanted it to repeat everything said.
PS: IBM Watson bought some critical medical companies recently. It would probably do better at analyzing xrays, CTs and MRIs than sending them off to some cheap sweatshop in India. It will probably be more consistent than can be achieved even with well trained individuals.
I’ve very familiar with Watson…. I saw it on Jeopardy one time 🙂
I think more impressively is if Watson can replace a $300-400/hr attorney. We have way too many lawyers and folks in the legal profession in this country that way over complicates simple things, more so than doctors.[/quote]Ha ha …. regarding non-lawyer “folks in the legal profession” being replaced by “Dr. Watson,” Uhmmm …. that’s already been tried about 15-20 years ago, and, suffice to say, it didn’t end well :=0
The “attempted replacement” for non-lawyer clerks and secretaries was named “Dragon.” That is, their full name was, “Dragon Naturally Speaking” :=D
Of course, Mr/Ms “Dragon” never filed any workers comp claims for carpal tunnel syndrome but in spite of that, they only lasted a week or so on the job before they were all summarily fired :=0
The primary duties of Mr/Ms Dragon were to type whatever they heard on the dictaphone (dictated material). Have any of you ever tried to “proofread” the Dragon?? It’s hilarious! Not only does Mr/Ms Dragon “forget” to use adverbs, (s)he/it doesn’t understand singular from plural, cannot punctuate to save their souls (that was ok, since they didn’t have “souls”) and couldn’t discern one word from another similar-sounding word with a completely different meaning. In addition, Mr/Ms Dragon had no idea how to cite any law or legally format anything that was dictated to them! We had to have “human experts in the field” (whom “Dragon” was “hired” to eventually “replace,” lol) go thru ALL of Mr/Ms Dragon’s work with a fine toothed comb and fix it so it could be used in a court of law. Because we had to re-listen to the the dictated material that Dragon tried to transcribe, this took much longer and was far more tedious than doing all the work ourselves!
Buying several sets of the Dragon was an exercise in futility and a huge waste of money (software was a LOT more expensive back then than it is today). It was management’s bright idea to try the Dragon to see if they could get by with less humans (with different personalities whom they considered “difficult”) but alas, it turned out to be a fiasco. (Mr/Ms Dragon not only had no personality, they had no brain, either.) Thus, they were hopelessly incompetent.[/quote]
The reason why technology hasn’t pursued this isn’t that technology can’t eventually solve this problem. It’s all about cost.
It’s much cheaper to hire a young paralegal than to invest in technology to do the same thing. And given the way the legal profession has been over the past few years, there’s a lot of supply of people who can do all this work to such that at this point that there is no financial incentive to invest in technology to try this at a lower cost at this point.. Over the past few years many people pursue a career to be a lawyer. Some made it, many did not. And the ones that didn’t add to the ever increasing supply of folks playing supporting roles.
That said, you can’t replace a top trial lawyer and you probably can’t report a lawyer that is good negotiating. But eventually you could replace all the administrative functions with technology if cost was an issue.
