LAWYERS AND SELF-DRIVING CARS: AN EXAMPLE OF JOB LOSS FROM AI/ROBOTICS

To try to demonstrate the employment effects of AI/robotics technology I am going to offer an example of a technological development--self-driving cars and other vehicles--that has seemingly “come out of left field” only during the past year or so but that will eliminate millions of jobs across a large and diverse spectrum.  As I lay out below the job loss will affect lawyers, doctors and other medical personnel, therapists, pharmaceutical and insurance workers and much more.  The employment impact resulting from Artificial Intelligence and robotics systems is not simply because they are or will be capable of doing the same job as well or better and at a lower cost than the human workers they displace.  Job elimination will also take place due to the removal of the underlying “environment” on which the human workers currently employ their labor.  This is what I see as occurring as an inevitable result of the shift to self driving cars, trucks and other vehicles, assuming the claims to the vastly enhanced accident avoidance and safety features of such vehicles are even close to accurate.

 

In outlining some of the employment consequences resulting from a shift to self-driving safer cars and other vehicles I want to mention lawyers because lawyers are easy targets.  No one likes lawyers unless and until they are in need of legal representation.  I’m a lawyer and law professor and I don’t even like lawyers all that much because they are always contentious or talking about bad things.  The real reason for bringing lawyers up at this point in the discussion, however, is that it seems like many people teaching in law schools are still suffering under the delusion that the legal job market—and therefore the demand for a continuing stream of new law school graduates—is going to rebound and “happy days” will be here again.  That’s not going to happen for a variety of reasons, one of which will be the shift over a relatively brief period to self-driving motor vehicles.