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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6361 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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I'm going to bring this up just because its in the back of my mind and I'm going to reserve some small amount of probability for it.

But I can imagine the scenario where Sam himself arranges for these (pretty ineffective, obviously) attacks against his home as a counter to the bad press and to make sure he keeps his grasp on power, as he's already been ousted once.

Yes, it's implausible that he'd pull a Jussie Smollet, it is VASTLY more likely to be actual random violence. But I have enough distrust for Altman that I think he'd be willing to do something like this, especially if it carried minimal risk of personal harm.

My youngest brother is a bright kid - top of his class, eagle scout, 1400+ on his SATs as a junior, the whole shebang. He's completely given up on his original goal of going to college for something software-related, and he's not only adrift about what he's going to do with his future, but he's angry about it. I hope he has a support network sufficient to keep him on the right track, but I don't like what I see.

Holy cow.

I guess the high achievers are technically the MOST likely to feel this anxiety, because they can directly perceive their competition is no longer just other high achievers... but this machine that can outperform them on every single metric that matters for success.

And as a former High School Valedictorian myself... I don't have a good answer here.

Its patently absurd to say he should toss out his academic achievement and instead divert into blue collar/physical work.

But to continue in academics would be a doomed play.

Uhhh get him in a gym and possibly doing some martial arts STAT, if only for the mental health benefits.

Its patently absurd to say he should toss out his academic achievement and instead divert into blue collar/physical work.

At this point he's considering law, because lawyers decide what's allowed or not in this country. His opinion is that it'll be one of the last safe fields left.

Okay.

As a lawyer, I am going to say no, don't do that.

His logic is not unsound, since we do in fact have control over how our profession is practiced and can use our guild authority to keep AI sidelined (for now). Here's a take I had three years ago that I still stand by. I've reiterated it. (holy crap GPT-3 was almost 6 years ago?)

Yes we can throw up barriers to AI adoption, and make the laws that protect us from AI competition. That's not as strong a moat as it seems. Even if lawyers are protected from AI competition... guess what your clients are doing.

And:

A) A bunch of other people are going to get a similar idea, so it'll be saturated, most likely. Already happening to an extent.

B) Most lawyers are miserable in their area of law. I am not, but I still had a long period of suck to get through, kept alive by my long-term goal of getting where I am now.

C) He will probably not become fabulously wealthy in this field even if AI doesn't supplant most entry-level legal jobs. MAKE HIM AWARE OF THE BIMODAL SALARY DISTRIBUTION FOR NEW GRADS. This was my big mistake early on.

There is now some evidence of downward pressure on new grad salaries.

I truly wish I had a more positive prescription to give out, but I am vehement about this negative one.

I think this sort of thing is really difficult to predict. It seems pretty clear that there will be some minimum demand for attorneys in the future:

By law, corporations must be represented by licensed attorneys;

It seems likely that a human being will be needed to make arguments to a jury;

Consulting with an attorney, who then queries an LLM, gives you a stronger argument that the communication is privileged than if you just query the LLM directly.

On the other hand, it seems plausible that the number of lawyers required will drop by quite a lot. If 50% of legal work can be done by LLMs, then a lot of lawyers will still have jobs, but many (including a lot of new grads) will end up unemployed.

But will it really work like that? There has been an explosion in litigation over the last 40 years, in part because technology made it more economically feasible to pursue disputes. One of the dirty little secrets of the US Court system is that a lot of the time judges throw out meritorious cases because they believe the system is just too busy to be bothered. A lot of wrongs never get litigated simply because there just aren't enough lawyers and judges to handle them.

So it's entirely possible that with AI, there will be more demand for lawyers than ever.

I just don't see anyway to sustain the pipeline if fresh Associates CANNOT outperform the LLMs, especially on price.

If a law firm can spin up an arbitrary amount of 'agents' that have all the requisite knowledge to handle a given legal issue, maybe they hire some attorneys to wrangle the agents and sign off on their output.

But that doesn't give those attorneys good legal experience they can translate into advancing their career. That's a step above doc review.

Hell, AI should be able to replace most Law School professors. It SHOULD become possible to become a competent lawyer without setting foot in a law school campus.

So naively, what I see coming down the pike is a massive spike in the 'supply' of legal knowledge that is on tap... and no clear reason why people should prefer the person who got a 6-figure loan for law school (and has to bill accordingly) over the $20-$200/month uberexpert that lives in their pocket. So from whence comes demand for human lawyer?

Basically one thing: Accountability. They can be punished for screwups.

One of the dirty little secrets of the US Court system is that a lot of the time judges throw out meritorious cases because they believe the system is just too busy to be bothered. A lot of wrongs never get litigated simply because there just aren't enough lawyers and judges to handle them.

One possible outcome is that governments spend money beefing up their legal systems, staffing out enough judges and clerks and such to actually meet the surge.

But courts are a pure cost center, so I just doubt it happens. Instead I think more disputes go to private arbitration, or maybe AI Mediators become a popular option. I think the demand for NONJUDICIAL resolutions surges! They're cheaper and possibly even more accurate. And if mediation and arbitration becomes popular... guess what all those rules about attorneys being needed to argue for a jury or represent a corpo get sidestepped very neatly.

You’ll still need clerical workers to supervise the LLM’s or something analogous to that. I’ll never be sold on the great transformative possibilities of them due to the mathematical impossibility of resolving the hallucination problem. How are you going to trust that it correctly read that Congressional omnibus bill?

How do you trust a human assistant did so?

You verify.

So then what problems is the LLM solving in that case? The advantage doesn’t seem to be all that great.

Its doing the same work but faster, cheaper, and probably more thoroughly, and can be scaled up arbitrarily.

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