‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI wrong

This sort of sensationalism, in general, is so completely ingrained into reporting that it's hard to separate from journalism itself. It's part of the journalistic style, an inevitability of the medium.

We see an article, click a link, by a paper, but we are never committing to more than a second or two of attention at a time. The headline makes you read the byline. The byline gets you reading the second sentence. At every step, a journalist loses most of her readers. The winning strategy is to increase "story," play to existing opinions, be sensational, use bait... There are flavours and degrees, but by and large writing like this is n inevitability of the medium, of journalism.

If you are reporting on programs that "developed a type of machine-English patois to communicate between themselves.." you are reporting on whether or not the skynet singularity is coming, almost certainly.

If we want something different, I think we'll need a medium change.

Personally, I was hoping e-readers would catalyze a new medium subtype: 30-100 page mini books. A lot of "news cycle.." the drip, drip, sensation of the day journalism just isn't a good way of understanding anything.

What happened between North Korea and the US this year? What's been happening with the Syrian war? Brexit as of July 2018...? I would be very happy to exchange the daily/weekly news bulletins for monthly/quarterly mini books.

Can you name a legal tech product that is currently used and really improves productivity?

Generally I agree with many of your points, especially that tech w i l l transform law. However, I'm not so sure how soon that will be.

I also studied law and I am a coder and I see similarities between both. However, I think it will be a long time until a computer will truly replace a lawyer. There is one thing that I think is especially hard: Not all rules are clear cut (like "If the company has a turnover >5 Million, x applies"). Many rules have an element of judgement (in Germany we call it "unbestimmte Rechtsbegriffe", which roughly translates as vague legal concepts) that require context knowledge, which is something that has not yet been achieved by machines (or at least I wouldn't know about it). While logic is undoubtly an important part of law, judgement (especially one that requires broad context knowledge) and interpretation it another one, and from what I experienced, the latter can unfortunately often not to be solved with the rules of logic and thus it will be hard to bring a computer to do it.

But most people don't want that, sadly.

Instant mass media has shown us that people want to consume media about other real people -- that they admire in some fashion -- going through life. Not reporting, explanation, facts, or science.

So reporters have responded with tweets and instant feedback on anything that's happening. Many times even when nothing is happening, they know they have to put out some kind of personal emotional response to keep the audience.

Newspaper and in-depth reporting worked for the most part because nobody really cared about the author. They cared about the material. That's flipped upside down now. The material doesn't matter as much as the author. Even the reall good occasional long-form material you might find is all geared to get you into a personal, minute-by-minute "relationship" with the author. To become part of the tribe.

It's interesting, because as a coder and lawyer I have the exact opposite view. Legal technology is a lot like coding technology -- there has been stuff invented since the mid 1990s, but it's all of debatable utility (see Paul Graham's articles on Lisp). What are these tools the capacity of which lawyers are underestimating? To me, legal tech seems a lot like the talk about how visual programming tools were going to make coders unnecessary.

The law (at least, litigation) involves marshalling precedent and facts to achieve persuasion. Circa 1990s tools like WestLaw are still the gold standard for legal research. And technological tools for collecting, organizing, and synthesizing facts are basically non-existent.

There is, in fact, market validation of the idea that legal technology is not particularly useful. You might argue that defense lawyers have disincentives to adopt technology that would reduce billable hours, but what about the other side of the v.? Plaintiffs' lawyers working on a contingency basis have enormous incentives to minimize effort invested in each case. Yet they don't.

> You might argue that defense lawyers have disincentives to adopt technology that would reduce billable hours, but what about the other side of the v.?

The US has a vast oversupply of lawyers (sure, star litigators make lots of money because they are in short supply, but they aren't the people whose labor legal technology aims to replace), which makes the value of reducing legal gruntwork low, plus to replace legal grunts using WestLaw or similar tools, you've got to either build on top of one the handful of such tools or duplicate it's corpus of annotated data and the massive infrastructure dedicated to keeping it current before you even get to the novel part of your tool, or you won't have anything usable.

So, it's a super high barrier to entry for a market where you are competing with cheap, abundant human labor.