After an asteroid crashed into the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico 66 million years ago, it caused a climate catastrophe.
The Earth was shrouded in darkness, sunlight was blocked, and the 180 million years ‘age of the dinosaurs’ came to an abrupt end.
Now, 66 million years later, in 2025, some -- but not all -- computer geeks who are the masters of artificial intelligence predict that AI and its cleverer offshoot AGI are about to destroy millions of jobs.
I wonder if that will ever happen.
The same terrifying predictions were made before earlier economic revolutions. Workers fearing for their jobs rioted during the industrial revolution in 18th century Britain. They were wrong, hugely so, because millions more jobs were created than destroyed. History is full of similar examples.
Cleverer than humans?
So why should Artificial Intelligence be different? It is a question being tossed back and forth between optimists and pessimists.
A founding father of AI, the Nobel prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, is the most pessimistic.
He says AI will soon be much more intelligent than humans, so much so that it will have a survival instinct so strong that it will refuse to shut itself off and will use lies and deceit to protect itself.
OpenAI’s boss Sam Altman is certain that AI will replace a lot of human labour. But Jensen Huang, the Taiwanese American founder and CEO of Nvidia thinks otherwise.
He predicts that companies will find that AI increases productivity massively and what, he asks, do companies do when their productivity and therefore their profits increase? — they hire more workers.
We are told that dentists and hairdressers are safe, for now at least, but authors and lawyers, among many occupations, face an uncertain future.
The dawn of AGI
In England an IT adviser to the Chief Justice has suggested that much cleverer AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, will enable the creation of systems that “match human performance at all cognitive tasks” which will lead to a fundamental reappraisal of the role of lawyers.
A slither of hope is that lawyers who practise criminal law may be spared AGI’s wrath. That’s because criminal law, for now at least, involves face-to-face interrogation, evidence evaluation, legal argument and judicial judgement.
Civil law on the other hand is ripe for AGI because it involves mountains of paperwork, which AGI will be able to process far faster than any human. Will AGI replace lawyers? I very much doubt it.
On the pessimistic side there is an Oxford University academic called Richard Susskind who has been studying the impact of AI on the law for over 30 years. As well as being the president of the Society for Computers and Law and for 25 years the technology advisor to England’s Chief Justice, he is also a Kings Counsel (the equivalent of a Senior Counsel in Hong Kong). He has now put his accumulated thoughts into a book ‘How to Think About AI -- a Guide for the Perplexed.’
Projecting how AI will affect the justice system, Susskind says legal systems everywhere are already creaking as they move into an AI-based digital society. Too many lawmakers, judges and lawyers, he says, believe the common law system can evolve and absorb AGI.
“They find it hard to imagine that the system of which they are an integral part may not endure,” he writes.
Within 10 years, he says, AGI will be able to deliver legal results that are better, quicker and cheaper. Clients will love it as much as lawyers will hate it. Lower costs will be music to clients’ ears. Without human help AGI will resolve legal issues, prevent risks, decipher complexities, analyze processes, enter into agreements, and all in the blink of an eye.
He says the law is about to be turned on its head in the sense that lawyers will no longer be the empowered party. It will be the clients who are AGI-empowered. Litigation will be done by AGI-based online dispute resolution.
Compliance law and regulation will be embedded in electronic systems. Routine legal matters in tax, intellectual property, banking, and international law will be handled by friendly AGI-bots. Mergers, acquisitions, and property matters will be negotiated between AGI systems.
We will soon find out if Susskind’s predictions are right but I think he underestimates the ability of lawyers to adapt to the challenge, and the opportunity, of an AI future.
The pessimists, I believe, have got this one wrong. All businesses, including legal ones, will be transformed for the better by AI.
AI and its coming offsprings AGI and ‘super-intelligence’ will be irresistible assistants that make for a better world. China’s DeepSeek and its progeny will likely dominate the world in a market-driven AI revolution.
Cheng Huan is an author and a senior counsel who practices in Hong Kong.
