AI and the Future of Lawyers: The Hidden Cost of Cognitive Surrender

Author:  Raghav Arora is a lawyer, litigator, educator, legal entrepreneur, and writer focused on AI, regulation and the future of legal practice.
Linkedin:  Raghav Arora | LinkedIn

The gamut of products and services that humans most frequently interact with/get addicted to, and rely on is rather mercurial, with new inventions being revealed every passing hour. Products are thrown into the ocean of consumers like little pellets and are consumed by the starving fish - fish that want/need the product, fish that can use the product to become bigger, smarter, more affluent in their school, or might as well use them only for entertainment/leisure. After the product has served its life, or satiety is reached, it phases out, and the insatiable and gluttonous ocean waits for another pellet to fall. While some are short-lived trends, some pellets persist, and then some literally rejig the waters and go down in history as revolutionary. The stirrers! 

We have seen revolutionary pellets being thrown into this ocean and making way to all schools of fish. Television for the longest time - serving the want of entertainment - now phasing out; Automobile - two-wheeler - serving wants and needs - still growing stronger, mobile phones - serving want and need - still going strong. 

Some products then, are a class apart and may be referred to as the 'camo' products. Harmless to look at. Often gouging/healthwashing/greenwashing/brainwashing. A packet of Atta Maggi/Diet Coke/Complan/Insta Feed/Pornography/Cannabis - serving wants/desires and needs BUT deep down parasitic/insidious - deploying deception. Such products trick us into believing that they are harmless or even a supporting friend. An enemy in disguise. A Trojan Horse you yourself invited home. You put real effort and took real pains to internalize it! This one exacts a ruinous price. It is not a one-way street satisfying the fish's hunger. It is often a trade-off, and the fish pays more than just the MRP.

Now even this 'camo' pellet is one-upped by AI. It steps up the game and distinguishes itself from any other pellet of the past by completely eating into one thing that is uniquely unique to humans - intelligence - cognitive skills. Inimitable in the real sense. Signature trait of the human race. AI is not limited to just lending cognitive support or mitigating menial labor, which is what a lot of other revolutionary products like phones and computers have already offered. AI is not merely offering cognitive offloading. What AI does translates to cognitive surrender! 

No other product comes close. Or at least not at the scale and speed that AI has gate-crashed in. Cannabis/Pornography and the ilk? They come close but miss. The 'brahmastra' that this 'stirrer' carries is the sheer tendency to deceive a human by munching into the power of a person to reason/question. Wool is pulled over the target's eyes. He is lead on to believe that he is getting smarter, more knowledgeable, more successful. He has won. He is now a bigger fish!

A pellet that makes that fish feel full to the gill. The fish would not have to leave its home again to hunt for food. This product falls as a pellet, then turns into the water current. It deceives the fish into thinking it is its own skills, muscle, scuttle/undulation, that it darts through the waters. Realization is deferred to the day when the current is withdrawn, and muscles have no muscle memory/history to draw on. Those good old set of muscles are not really enough for the open waters anymore and certainly not strong enough to make any negotiations with the water - the provider of life for the fish. 

Artificial Intelligence has become a household name and spreads faster and stealthier than any other revolutionary product. It has no limits. Unbridled by the limitations of language, subject, expertise of the user, and soon, not even the internet. Just a simple piece of tech like a mobile phone, an eye wear, an ear piece is enough. A fierce competitor to the champions already fighting for the attention and pampering the wants and needs of our brains, guts, muscles, and eyes. And this one now seems to be besting them all because it does something different. It does not merely feed a want or need. It caters to the desires and dreams. The life goals. This need is not disposable. Not negotiable. Not easily foregone. This is all that we are. This is all that our social circle wants from us, apparently. It caters to our admirations and goals. It is the channel to the validation we seek. It caters to the expectations that we are expected to heed!

Logistically, AI fulfils the gap created by lack of a decision-making arsenal, when we miss the right environment, right circumstances, right facilities, adequate knowledge and guidance, right mentor/Guru. A Guru-Companion, a luxury only a few lucky ones would discover in their lifetimes in the pre-AI and post-Gurukul eras. 

At the end of the day, the life of a human being is nothing but a bundle of decisions. Where a man stands today is the average of the quality of these small and big decisions. 

AI acts like a Guru-companion and has now started hand-holding/shepherding this dear 'shishya' toward his life goals, career goals, and his vision, just like in the times of folklore, BUT this time without any challenges, without asking him to prove himself worthy, without a Guru-dakshina, without a tapasya. Result: Every journey towards the end of each goal keeps making him weaker in his brain and willpower. Every time, he just gets that little application drafted in seconds, with no effort to frame a detailed and reasoned prompt. Every time he gets that list of 100 cross-examination questions without spending a single brain cell on the process. Rather, an evolutionarily innocent-greedy creature getting the easy dopamine bursts that he most desires/lusts.

If it was not for the newly added arsenal i.e - advanced deception, deferred realization, pampering of dreams, near-zero friction/efforts, and quick delivery of results, - finally making the feeling of intense comfort/escape/satisfaction as easy to get as chips, robbing the user of patience and attention span already in shambles due to the likes of social media - AI would not have been such a threat. 

I mean, we survived camo inventions like calculators - offloading the need to work out figures and formulas on paper sheets - taking away our opportunity to offer some cardio to the connections in our brains needed to arrive at an arithmetic conclusion. The calcis acted like cognitive support helping us make space for the larger math and problem solving. A good trade-off. We survived search engines - easy access to information through search engines removed friction and workout offered by manual research in the libraries - cognitive offload. Survivable, though significantly affecting attention spans and patience. 

But today, it is not just access to information - AI is giving us the whole frame of final thought worked out on demand. The need to pick the grain out of the chaff, collecting the abstract information and molding it into an intelligible shape - has been preempted and obviated. It is like us sending a robot to the gym to train in our stead. The machine does the warm-up, stretching, sets up the weight, and does all of the 12 reps. The results are produced with just 1% of the effort one would usually have to put in to get the same results without AI. 

The threat: With no use for the neural connections required for the frictional work, they would weaken with time and turn the brain into mush before we know. Deteriorated brain performance has been recorded and concluded by scientists in many studies now, and the mushing brain is not just a hypothesis anymore.

But is AI Advantageous? Beneficial? Yes, of course. Rather, a little too advancing, too quick. Devil's own workshop. Comparable to a 'catapult'. 

The vigor, thrust, throttle, and power of this trebuchet is too much to control for a world of humans where discretion, 'Vivek', will-power/resolve is at its lowest as a consequence of an incessant supply and demand of poisonous pellets. The catapult riders do not have feet firm and spines strong enough to face the inertia/the brute impetus of this flight. Without a safe chair, one would break his spine and neck as soon as he is launched. The bodies won't be able to break through the air as they are launched into the future and taken for a ride towards their dreams. Emphasis on 'taken for a ride'. 

So the TnC of the product (which nobody is bothered to read, ever!) read: "for your own safety - you must strap yourself to a safe chair, safely and professionally tied to strong ropes and straps AND in no time advance into the future. Be twice the man you already are. Be twice the brain. Twice the writer, composer, lawyer, creator. 

All of this, from the comfort of a couch and TOTALLY FREE OF COST!" Or maybe not! 

The rider keeps on reclining the chair/couch further back until one day he would not be able to pull himself together without assistance. At this point, one might dread imagining a day when this current is withdrawn or when the wheelchair is not available, and the human is dared to stand on his own feet again. 

One day, the continuously data-consuming, ever-spying, and self-training chair-operator i.e 'AI' would feed itself with enough whispers and intel about the pitifully weakened state of this rider peacefully sleeping on the couch, and would be in no need of taking commands/instructions from him. It would now throw instructions to the lawyer to heed. The lawyer would wake up only to millions others sleeping on their wheelchairs and couches without a care, realizing that, just like him all of the other riders have been reduced to not more than brainless minions for the AI's disposal of the world of humans as the machines would like. Worse - like how the controllers of these machines would like. The creators of this product would like. The rider will have to submit to the commands because he is no longer the man he was. He has surely taken leaps into the future and made years' worth of money in days and catapulted himself, but this leap has placed him firmly in a wheelchair, an eco-system which is made to feel like the coziest couch, and standing up on the feet once again is nearly impossible. 

Why is this specially dreading in the case of lawyers?

In the opinion of the author - this job is one of the most speculative and uncertain jobs and is only driven by, survives, and thrives on the quality of brains a lawyer owns or has managed to acquire. 

Secondly, this job caters to consumers who have lives at stake, and thirdly, the evaluator (Judges) is diligent about details and a master scrutinizer and cannot be taken for a ride, mostly! 

The direct effect of WRONGLY using AI includes weakened neural connections because of constant bypassing of cognitive friction/workout, which actually helps making newer and stronger connections in our brain (Just like lifting weights and training muscles to get stronger), consequently also resulting into losing unique ideas while morphing the brain into a manufacturer of homogenous thoughts, weaker memory, and power to recall concepts and information consumed. Sound like a bunch of skills that you could use in the Courtroom? 

But is this a nuanced view? No. Is there much more to be said and heard before passing a hard sentence on use of AI? Yes. Does the effect depend on the manner of use? - YES. PROBABLE SOLUTIONS and other interesting and relevant-to-lawyers answers? In the articles to come...