TECHNOLOGY AND LAW
Artificial intelligence + generative AI By STERLING MILLER
“Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before. "Star Trek" (TV Series 1966-1969)
S
ome of the best scenes in the television show Star Trek, the original version, are those involving the crew members — usually Mr. Spock — asking
the computer a question and the computer spitting out the answer in the form of a conversation. When I was younger, I thought this was utterly amazing, and, of course, I wanted my computer that would “answer” any question I cared to ask. This was around the time when typewriters and dinosaurs ruled the Earth, and the first calculators — addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division only — were coming on the market. So, needless to say, a computer that could talk and interact with people was just a notion in a science fiction story back then. I also remember the first time you could access the internet, send an email, stream music, wirelessly connect to a printer, use Webex or Teams to collaborate and the time when Zoom made video conferencing as easy as clicking a button. Before this, setting up a video conference call took several hours, several folks from IT, and several years of your life as the technology inevitably failed, wasting a ton of time and effort.
26 JANUARY 2024
There was so much friction in setting up a video conference in those days; I am surprised no one burst into flames trying. Yes, I’m a bit creaky and have been around awhile, but I am pleased to say that I have never been a “get off my lawn” type of person regarding technology. On the contrary, I have always embraced it, believing that technology can help lawyers do more, do it better, and do it at a lower cost. Never has this been truer than it is now in 2024.
Many of you probably first heard of ChatGPT in late 2022 or early 2023. Unless you have been living on the moon for the past nine months or so, ChatGPT has come to dominate headlines. Not only in the business world generally with changing how people do their jobs but also in the world of legal services where, for perhaps the first time, people are starting to ask if lawyers can survive this technological tsunami.
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