Lawyers

Calling you "racist" against clankers was an absolutely WILD take (if serious). At any other time, I'd call it low-tier bait. But we now live in a world where this actually "has to" exist: https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/comments/1n9lmxp/clanker_and_why_its_not_racist_end_of_story/ Anyway, the top-tier lawyers are famously very low in agreeableness and high in traits associated with psychopathy. I'm not saying that any individual lawyer is a psychopath, of course, but that the field attracts, on average, a higher number of high-functioning psychopaths than most others. I'm not sure that empathy is even a strength in the practice of law. I'd probably want my defender to be an excellent manipulator and rhetorician with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the law. Caring about what happens to me or even believing that I'm innocent would be surprisingly low down on my list of priorities. In fact, it's that rhetorical ability and suasion that will make barristers, in particular, difficult to replace -- rather than any hard factor. I don't think a robot barrister would curry any favour with a judge or jury. Far from any racial bias (to stay with a theme), in as much as they have them, I think modern Western people would be far more likely to display open hostility towards a robot. Crunching case law and statutes to reach conclusions, on the other hand, is a job tailormade for AI's strengths. Heck, a good Prolog interpreter + NLP engine automatically populated with case histories (in a common law domain) and all relevant law and documents would be able to have a decent go at it. Whether or not that *is* an AI system (sans the NLP component) is an epistemological debate for another time, but it highlights the ease with which one could create a legal software tool within the realms of deterministic programming (the logic paradigm is super-deterministic, if such a distinction exists). A raw "legal decider" with rules of precedence would be one of the easiest things to automate (with the semantic interpretations being the tough part). I'm not going to make a hasty generalisation and say that lawyers are easy to replace or anything, especially with all the minutiae I haven't considered here, but it's not one of the harder jobs either. One could easily envision an increasing amount of automation within the profession - as will be the case with a great many - until they just sort of realise that they're not actually needed within the system anymore. Creeping replacement is going to be one of the most insidious and dangerous kinds, so while I wouldn't advise panic yet, I would advise that people in the legal profession remain on guard. (As always, my answers come from a CSci perspective but with an understanding of all the jobs on which I comment. My background usually makes my predictions more accurate than the people commenting on their own occupations, because the median user of this site often speaks more in blind hope than in expectation and without a true understanding of what AI is. I don't like that because it can encourage young people to walk down blind alleys. In this case, I don't think it is a complete dead end, but as with all jobs that mandate a great degree of higher education, you'll definitely want to weigh the significant cost of becoming a lawyer against the possibility of job contraction in the field.)